MIAMI, United States. – Cuban director Orlando Mora Cabrera denounced this Sunday that his short film Kill a man would have been the subject of censorship during the 45th edition of the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana. Although the suspensions of the screenings were attributed to electrical outages, the director maintains that this explanation does not justify the definitive exclusion of his work from the program.
The 12-minute film was included in the short and medium-length film competition and appeared, on December 7, on the ICAIC Film and Video Billboard. According to Mora Cabrera, the poster of his work was featured on the cover of the Festival newspaper and placed among the 10 Latin American recommendations in competition.
The first screening, scheduled for December 8 at 5:30 pm at the Multicine Infanta, was canceled due to lack of electricity. That same night, according to the filmmaker, the complex’s directors indicated that “even if the electricity came back on, they had received instructions not to show our short film (…) so as not to delay the next batch.”
The second screening, scheduled for December 9 at Cinema 23 and 12, was also thwarted by another blackout. At the director’s insistence, programmer Ángel Pérez confirmed by telephone a new date for December 10 at 8:00 pm at the Acapulco Cinema, but less than an hour later programmer Elvira Rosell informed him of the suspension with “reasons.” ” not publicly specified.
On December 12, Mora addressed the Festival director, Tania Delgado Fernández, to request an explanation. The response he received was: “Absolutely nothing. “We have had difficulties with those blocks due to the blackouts, but those movies are going to be rescheduled over the weekend.” However, on December 14, a billboard was published that did not include Kill a manand on Sunday the 15th he did not appear on the program either.
Mora senses that the true motivations for the exclusion respond to “essentially homophobic reasons” and the discomfort caused by the short film’s focus on “violence, domination or control that can be exercised over our bodies.” The film, starring Eduardo Martínez Castillo and with the participation of the actress and LGBTIQ+ activist Kiriam Gutierreztells the last performance of an erotic dancer before a client who refuses to accept him.
“The Havana Festival (…) has become a favorable scenario for abuses such as those that my film and those of so many others have faced,” criticized the director on Facebook, emphasizing that the event has become “ an incoherent festival (…) of excesses, in times that cry out for austerity.”
