The Cuban actor, director and plastic artist Jorge Perugorría confessed to feeling “excited and counting the days” before the premiere, next week, of the Festival International Film and Environment of the Caribbean Isla Verde.
In the midst of the hustle and bustle of directing a project like this, in the “difficult conditions of Cuba,” Perugorría (Havana, 1965) says that he is “very excited because it can open a path for collaboration among Cuban filmmakers on this issue.”
We want the Isla de la Juventud to become a beacon in terms of environmental conservation, for the Caribbean! We know how much a project like this can transform a community, leave a mark!”— @JorgePerugorria
The countdown begins! pic.twitter.com/R6FEnaUHWb— Isla Verde Festival (@islaverdefest) May 26, 2023
Green Island It will take place from May 31 to June 5 in the special municipality of Isla de la Juventud, the second largest in the Cuban archipelago and located to the southwest, about 174 kilometers from Havana.
Perugorría, who began to consolidate his film career with the character of the homosexual intellectual Diego in the Cuban film Strawberry and Chocolate (1993), intends with this initiative to make visible the environmental challenges facing the Caribbean.
In addition, “accompanying the Isla de la Juventud (formerly Isla de Pinos) in an environmental transformation so that it can become a benchmark for conservation,” he told efe from his gallery, the Taller Gorría, in the Havana neighborhood of San Isidro.
An unprecedented festival
This first edition of the Festival will not be competitive, but will award honorary prizes to the Mexican film director Eleonora Isunza and the world record holder for freediving, the Cuban Deborah Andollo, Perugorría said.
The film event proposes a retrospective exhibition of the work of the French environmental activist and documentary filmmaker Yann Arthus-Bertrand, to whom it will also pay tribute at this meeting, added its director.
It also includes a posthumous tribute to the Cuban singer Osmel Francis, who contributed his years of work to the preservation of the environment.
Several of the films and documentaries that will be screened at the festival were contributed by the Good Planet Foundation (directed by Bertrand), Cinema Planeta and the International Green Film Network Association, a network that brings together more than 30 environmental festivals around the world.
The billboard, according to the director of the festival, includes the projection of works made in Cuba with the support of the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation, dedicated for years to the work of environmental preservation.
“We are going to work with children, adolescents and young people and we have specialists who are going to show films and then talk about an environmental education program. Here we are advised by Cinema Planeta, which has extensive experience in this matter, ”he advanced.
The versatile Cuban actor, with a long and multi-laureate career in Cuba and other countries, talks about Isla Verde with the same emotion that he puts into each new project.
“We will plant 3,000 pine trees to offset the carbon footprint generated by the event itself and we want to turn this forest into the “pine forest of cinema” because it is an action that we will do every year”, he explains.
Green Island, First International Film and Environment Festival of the Caribbean
The festival closes on June 5, World Environment Day, with a concert by the Cuban troubadour Silvio Rodríguez, “someone consistent who has been working with the Ariguanabo Foundation for many years to clean up the San Antonio de los Baños river,” he says.
Perugorría sees this project “as a film” whose result will be “for the Isle of Youth, and for Cuba.”
Efe/OnCuba.
