Havana/What should have been a celebration of young art and creative freedom ended on a door without explanations, under the costume of a “technical problem.” On Saturday, July 12, the 30th generation of the International School of Film and Television (EICTV), based in San Antonio de los Baños, was presented at the Acapulco Cinema of Havana with its graduation short films in hand, willing to share with the public the fruit of its talent, effort and training. But the screen was never lit, nor did the doors open and nobody gave a clear answer.
For more than three decades, the projection of the thesis works of the graduates has been a tradition that not only marks the academic closure, but allows new filmmakers to show their gaze to the world from a public hall. This year, however, that right was denied without official justification, without visible interlocutors and, above all, without transparency.
“An unprecedented fact in the history of our school”
The students denounced the event in A statement that circulates in social networks and has been supported by members of the national film guild, including the Cuban filmmakers. The cancellation, they said, was “an unprecedented fact in the history of our school.” Two buses full of students, family members, technicians and teachers arrived at Havana cinema only to meet closed doors, absent posters and an institutional silence that smells like censorship.
Just twenty minutes after the time scheduled for the beginning, a school official reported, briefly, that everything was canceled by “supposed technical problems.” But students, and anyone who has lived in Cuba enough time recognizes the strategy. There was no billboard, projection equipment or will to resolve or reprogram. There was only one known maneuver: to pass censorship by accident.
Susana Molina did not even offer explanations to the students
The authoritarian gesture is not an isolated fact. As the FilmmakersSimilar “technical failures” prevented the exhibition of films during the last film festival, without any of them being reprogrammed later. Nor is it a novelty that the Ministry of Culture – through its network of institutions – maintains absolute control over the country’s rooms, conditioning what is projected and what does not, and leaving many filmmakers outdoors whose works never get to meet their audience.
But what this case reveals with particular rawness is the level of intervention and institutional manipulation that the EICTV has reached, once a symbol of plurality and creative independence. Founded in 1986 by Gabriel García Márquez, Fernando Birri and Julio García Espinosa – with the “protection” of Fidel Castro himself -, the school was born with Latin American and international vocation, open to dialogue between cultures and critical thinking from the cinema. Today, its direction seems to subordinate without questions to the single party and its control mechanisms, relegating the foundational principles to the uncomfortable archive.
The Current director From the EICTV, Susana Molina, did not even offer explanations to the students. He hung the phone to a student representative when he was asked for an answer. His silence, according to multiple voices of the guild, is not accidental or new. Its management has been indicated as opaque, repressive and functional to political power. For many, she represents the face of an institution that, instead of defending her students, prefers to align with the bureaucrats who decide which cinema deserves to see each other and which no.
The students, far from passively accepting the situation, publicly demanded “explanations of the Ministry of Culture and the direction of the EICTV; guarantees that the thesis will be projected without restrictions; and respect for the academic and artistic autonomy of the school.” His statement was clear and brave: “We will not allow our cinema to be silenced.”
EICTV generation 30 is made up of 42 young people from more than a dozen countries
Since June, the student has been expressing his discontent for the deterioration of basic services and the bad infrastructural conditions of the school. The protests forced Fernando Rojas, former Deputy Minister of Culture and current direct advisor for the head of the branch, Alpidio Alonso. His presence on the campus, and not that of representatives of the foundation of the new Latin American cinema – which historically mediated the management of the EICTV – exposed a truth that was already intuited: the school has become under the direct control of the Ministry of Culture. Today, far from being an autonomous space of artistic creation, EICTV works under the vigilant look of the Government’s cultural commissioners.
In a country where public rooms are under state control and where the young show has disappeared without major explanation, censorship is no exception, but norm. Generation 30 of the EICTV, formed by 42 young people from more than a dozen countries, not only demands their right to show what they have created. Asks for respect for a promise: that the school is, like The official press prices“The school of all worlds”, and not one more gear in the machinery of silence.
