The Gabo Prize in the image category was awarded this Saturday at the Gabo Festival Gala to the documentary In the hot – stories of a reggaeton warrior, Directed by Cuban Fabien Pisani.
The other image finalists were Rose, An investigation by BBC News Brazil that reveals the history of innocent Brazilians imprisoned by drug trafficking, and OS OLHOS DA REVOLUçAOof Rádio and Televisão de Portugal, a documentary that rescues unpublished and forgotten images of the Carnation Revolution.
Produced by The Cuban Joint, Zafra Media, Cacha Films and Caffeine Post (Cuba-Eeu), the winning audiovisual was released unofficially in Havana last November at the headquarters of the Norwegian embassy.
The material narrates the emergence of the reggaeton on the Caribbean island through Candyman, a key artist of this musical movement, according to the Gabo Foundation, which delivers the awards every year.
“A brilliant and authentic story about expression through the Candyman reggaeton in Cuba. Its balanced narration stands out, which is supported assertively in music as a resource to explore authoritarianism, freedom and censorship,” said the jury.
When announcing the winner, the Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui, a member of the governing council of the Gabo Foundation, defined it as “an exceptional work, out of series.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8ivqvwmx48
According to the Foundation, this work “was born of the need to explore one of the less studied and understood periods of Cuban contemporary history: the moment when the great dream of a more just and equal society was broken.”
That happened in the mid -1990s, when “Cuba lived a series of disorders that deeply transformed a country that seemed frozen over time,” said the institution based in the city of Cartagena de Indias and founded in 1995 by the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, to promote ethical, innovative, rigorous and excellence journalism in Iberoamérica and the Spanish world.
“In the midst of that panorama, a young unusual name emerged: Candyman, central figure of a cultural movement that stirred the island with the strength that in the 60s had the new Cuban cinema and the new trova,” added the entity that awards the awards.
Upon receiving the prize, Pisani said that, although it is an “intruder” in this prize of journalism because it comes from the world of cinema, it shares with the journalists “the passion for telling stories and doing your best.”
Pisani expressed “the commitment to a reality, the Cuban, who has been distorted and hidden by many official speeches and with many clichés that resist in time.”
“It is not a secret that Cuba is living the worst moment in its history, the darkest, the most despair, and I want to think that telling these stories that can be difficult and uncomfortable is essential to think about a different future,” added the filmmaker and producer.
Pisani dedicated the prize to Rubén Cuesta Palomo “Candyman”, for letting him into his world, and the movement of cinema and independent journalism in Cuba, “which in a few years has managed to find a voice and a space to tell, inform, talk with the Cuban people and to update the photograph, the map and the stories of what Cuba is.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm0yi-yox5e
Born in Santiago de Cuba in 1976 and resident in the United States since 2017, Cuesta Palomo grew up listening to the radio of neighboring Jamaica and, therefore, reggae music. It was one of the first artists to incorporate musical styles Dancehall and Ragga Jamaicans in their compositions, thus creating the first unique sound of Cubaton In the early 2000s.
He is currently considered one of the leaders of the reggaetone scene. Maintains a long collaboration with the Swedish seal of Cubaton Topaz Records and has achieved fame in America and Europe within the genre.
In 2019, he changed his name from Candyman to Kandyman given his collaboration with Kobalt Music Group, one of the most innovative and influential musical companies of the 21st century in the global industry, founded in 2000 in New York by Swedish businessman Willard Ahdritz.
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For its part, Fabien Pisani (Havana, 1971) and son of the famous musician Pablo Milanés (1943-2022), founded and directed the Musicabana Festival, an event that sought to promote Havana as a musical capital connecting with the Caribbean and African tradition. During the last 20 years, he has worked as an editor, producer and director between New York and Havana. In 2011 he developed and produced the film “7 days in Havana”, and more recently directed the documentary “To live, the relentless time of Pablo Milanés”, premiered last June at the International Film Festival Sheffield Docfest, in the United Kingdom.
EFE/ ONCUBA
