“Each film has its own language and way of making it. The universes that attract me need to be filmed like this”, the filmmaker tells us. Luis Alejandro Yero when we asked him about the intricacies of filming Calls from Moscowhis latest film, which will premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) in February 2023.
“In May 2020, locked in an abandoned apartment in Havana, with the world paralyzed by a pandemic, in a city completely empty of all beloved faces, a question began to torment me: what is home. Almost like a provocation from the universe, a few days later I found an article that talked about the life of Cuban migrants in Moscow, locked up and with no future in a country that only offered them a hostile solitude. A year and a half later, I was flying to Moscow to try to answer that question that tormented me, ”he published in your instagram account.
Co-produced between Cuba, Germany and Norway, Calls from Moscow approaches four Cubans who spend their time in the apartment of a prefabricated building in the Russian capital, in an environment of hostility against homosexuals, trapped in a limbo where there is no possibility of returning to their country or taking another course.
This is the first installment of a trilogy on the diaspora and those spaces of deep expectation in which the Cuban exodus is immersed.
“Calls from Moscow It was filmed in a very ‘punk’ way: in an apartment we rented, with limitations where only the protagonists, the photographer and me were there. If we went out into the street we ran the risk of being stopped by the police and I even appear as a secondary character. One makes films to discover new horizons, to get out of yourself a bit and discover other experiences, spaces, territories. I had the need to answer vital questions that arose just after reading that article published in The country. I was ‘light years’ from his precariousness, but there was a common feeling of uprooting and that identified us ”, he explains to OnCuba.
Four days after filming ended, the war between Russia and Ukraine began. Two of the protagonists managed to return to Cuba and the other half remain there, up to now.
Calls from Moscow It will not be able to be exhibited in that country, given the current laws that prohibit all gay propaganda and equate homosexuality to pedophilia.
For Luis Rey, PhD in Art Sciences and university professor, in the work of Luis Alejandro Yero one appreciates “the ability to model his time, convulsed, unstable, with multiple confrontations. The probabilities of recognition of him in the field of pariahs rest on a set of qualities that dive into the human condition from the novel audiovisual ideo-aesthetic treatment, from unnoticed limits with subtle sociopolitical proposals ”.
Graduated in Documentary Direction from the San Antonio de los Baños International Film and Television School (EICTV) in 2018, Luis Alejandro Yero’s short films have been screened and awarded at more than one hundred festivals around the world and in cultural centers such as the Lincoln Center in New York.
He currently works as Academic Coordinator of the EICTV Documentary Chair. Calls from Moscow he joins an acclaimed list of documentaries, including: Natalia Nikolaevna, delivery years, the old heralds, notes from the shore Y The cemetery lights up.
