The independent film director Miguel Coyula lives in an absurd contradiction: He lives and films his multi-award-winning films in Cuba, but for the Government he is not a filmmaker and his feature films, for practical purposes, do not exist in the country.
That inconsistency, points out an interview by EFEcan you explain the name of your most recent job: Chronicles of the absurd.
The film has just been selected as Best Documentary at the Cinema Tropical Awards in New York, after achieving the highest recognition at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival.
The work is a compilation of 10 years of “absurdity” in a format that is both daring and astute. A kind of catharsis, as he explains in the interview, since Coyula’s works can only be projected in the living room of his house in the central neighborhood of Vedado.
Audios, recorded with a hidden cell phone
In his new work, for just over an hour, the director exposes audios, recorded with a hidden cell phone, of different times in which he and his partner, the actress and writer Lynn Cruz, have been interrogated by the Cuban authorities.
Intimidation and censorship start from something that is also considered a letter of introduction: being independent, since the creator is not part of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC).
Coyula believes in absolute independence: “in content and in forms.” This is also why it marks its distance from the Assembly of Cuban Filmmakers (ACC), a group created in 2023 that has sought to end censorship in the sector through complaints and forums with the authorities.
“I feel that, as long as the current government continues, any dialogue is deaf. And especially for the cinema that I am interested in making. They will never give in. I say that we are on Earth for a fairly limited time, and it is better to take advantage of it to create instead of going to useless meetings,” he reflects.
A documentary using audio recordings and subtitles
The story of Chronicles of the absurd It is crude, says journalist Juan Carlos Espinosa: It is a denunciation that does not require the voice of a narrator or a journey to put the viewer in context. Its intention is to expose the actions of the state apparatus and the official circles of Cuban cinema.
The challenge for Coyula, however, was more technical: how to make a documentary using only audio recordings and subtitles?
“I didn’t think I had enough material. Above all, with such an intrinsically anti-cinematic format, if we understand cinema as moving images,” he acknowledges.
Miguel Coyula after the award for Best Film at the Amsterdam Festival
Coyula managed to construct the story by pairing the audio files with images of paintings by the Cuban painter Antonia Eiriz. He used the artist’s works to represent the faces of the bureaucrats who interrogated them.
The exercise, however, was also a test of equanimity for Lynn Cruz. The documentary exposes tense moments for the actress, such as her expulsion from the state acting agency for expressing political opinions on social networks; or his complaint of medical negligence in the treatment of his father, who died in 2021, the Spanish agency points out.
