He denotes in his tone when speaking that he has lived the last 15 years in Cuba because, unlike many of his peers, David Bim decided to take the opposite path and leave Spain for the Antillean island.
“Now you walk through Havana and what you notice most missing are the people who were on the street (…). My entire generation, all those who have been my friends for the last 10 years, are outside of Cuba right now. I lost an eight-year relationship,” the film director confessed to EFE in Geneva.
Bim, born and raised in Spain but with a Cuban family, went to the Swiss city this weekend to present his debut film To the west, in Zapata (2025) at the Black Movie international independent film festival, which takes place in Geneva from January 16 to 25.
The documentary portrays the struggle of a family to survive and raise their son, who suffers from autism, in the Ciénaga de Zapata, a national park south of Havana.
The film, in black and white, manages to capture even the most intimate moments of the family, something that was only possible because, prior to filming, Bim lived with them for five years.
“First we were family, we are still family (…). I was not going to direct them what they had to do,” he explained.
To exemplify this, Bim mentioned some looks at the camera, during the crocodile hunting scene, where Landi shows his fear for the director’s own safety, who is recording him.
The director, he clarified, seeks with his cinema to escape from “representations” and political positions.
“Sometimes we see everything very cold and we want to have very fixed ideas about things and those who pay for it are the most forgotten classes of society, most isolated on the margins (…), they suffer and are forced to live like heroes,” he said.
Although, as he himself confessed, politics “is everywhere and even more so in Cuba, where political interference is tremendous.”
“I feel that words no longer mean anything. You turn on the television or turn on the radio and the words only hide propaganda. They tell you about a world that does not exist, that you have in front of you and that is not it,” said Bim, asked about the situation in the country.
Because his “hour by hour,” as he defined it, is marked by days, for the most part, without power, where you have to look for coal to cook or wait “a five-hour queue” to get a loaf of bread.
In this context, “it is difficult to think about the future,” he admitted, now an unknown for millions of Cubans with the recent capture of Nicolás Maduro and the US pressure for Venezuela to cut off the supply of crude oil to the island.
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“The things that are happening now undoubtedly have tremendous gravity, but one is no longer able to quantify how much worse it is going to be because you have to refer to the here and now,” described the film director.
Furthermore, for Bim, the Cuban “is a bit alone” and is not well received in the countries he tries to go to.
However, the director recognized how lucky he is to have a Spanish passport, which allows him to leave “if something goes very wrong,” a privilege that most Cubans do not enjoy.
Author: Alicia Hegar.
