MIAMI, United States. – Last Friday, March 3, began, at full speed, the miami film festival that celebrates four decades of success with a program where the Cuban-themed filmography becomes more ostensible than on other occasions.
The event is the only one in the United States that is part of the cultural efforts of a university such as Miami Dade College (MDC), an open-door higher education institution that presides over Madeline Pumariegaa young Cuban-American educator with a notable career, the first woman to hold such responsibility.
The direction of the Festival and the MDC entrusted me with the curatorship of the Cuban program of the event that in the end has turned out to be practically all sold out, which forced the opening of more screenings to satisfy the reception of the public.
The truth is that more Cuban films have already been screened at the Miami Film Festival than at the Havana Film Festival last December, marked by the censorship of Carlos Lechuga’s film. Vincent B. and the ninguneo granted to the most recent feature film by Fernando Pérez, Nelsito’s world. Both films open, however, this week in Miami.
The balance of the first days of the Festival has been to reveal and illuminate circumstances of Cuban history obliterated by Castroism.
Various attendees at the premiere of AfroCuba ’78 confessed their ignorance of what the talented musicians of the group’s first lineup suffered, excommunicated by the repressive evil of the dictatorship, while in another emblematic function of the event, the screening of the documentary The thunder and the windPedro Luis Ferrer makes it very clear his rejection of the lack of freedom of the regime.
The directors of both films, Emilio Oscar Alcalde and Jorge Soliño, respectively, explained the efforts to leave seated forever, through the eternity of cinema, chapters that will serve future generations to understand the damage customarily caused by totalitarian systems and resentment. that they manifest through art that refuses to commune with their excesses.
The same feeling, but with more urgency and immediacy, caused the world premiere of the documentary among those attending. Homeland and Life: The Power of Musicdirected by the Spanish actress, singer and director Beatriz Luengo.
It is not about the usual making off of the emblematic song turned into an anthem of the national rebellion that took place in July 2021but a moving and intimate reflection on the origin of the theme based on the personal story of one of its interpreters and composers, Luengo’s husband, the famous singer Yotuel, founder of the emblematic group Orishas.
Yotuel confided to me that the documentary had already been accepted at the important Malaga Film Festival that begins this week.
He also referred to his wife’s initial interest in making a documentary to spread the influence of the song to other ends of the world and how she developed it from her own narrative of the events, without her direct intervention in the process. aesthetic and conceptual body of the work.
With contagious joy, Yotuel let me know the satisfaction of having been able to put into question, forever, the tanatic motto of the dictator Castro, erasing “death” and the “o” without hope, to replace them with “life”, preceded by the “and” inclusive, open to freedom.
At the end of the presentation, Luengo could not contain his tears on several occasions when he referred, among other emotional topics, to the prisoners of the San Isidro Movement, including Maykel Osorbo, one of the song’s composers, and the artivist Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara.
At the same time, he recognized the help of the married couple of Gloria and Emilio Estefan -present during the function- as well as the American producer Michael Fux, who thanked for having participated in a project that contributes to the certainty of Cuban freedom.
Among other celebrities who also showed their solidarity with the making of the documentary were the singers Camila Cabello and Gloria Gaynor.
The first part of the Cuban-themed program at the Miami Film Festival ended that same night with four screenings of the most popular cinematic phenomenon of independent exile cinema, the continuation of the disturbing saga of the Cuban political prison with the world premiere of the film plantedby the directors Lilo and Camilo Vilaplana.
Present in a kind of front row of dignity, the tribute contained in the film attended women who suffered firsthand the hatred of a dictatorship with no room for dissent, much less for those who, like them, dared to conspire against their early repression.
The presentation served to remind that there are still political prisoners in the Castro dungeons, of which photographs were shown.
He influencers Alex Otaola stressed that the excesses narrated in planted we are not allowed to forget or turn the page, and that criminals and their accomplices must be brought to justice.
It was very encouraging to see that at the end of the screening, not a few of the young actors who stood before the audience to thank the applause as well as the presence of the endearing old women, recently escaped from Cuba and received their exile baptism recreating a part of the history silenced by Castroism.
OPINION ARTICLE
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