Let’s Talk About a festival…
December for Cubans is the month of Santa Bárbara, of Babalú Ayé, as well as the month of Christmas and of a lot of dancing on New Year’s Eve.
For the last forty-five years another tradition has been added, an event that from the beginning has made Havana more cosmopolitan and, even during the best of times, rearranged the dynamics of the city—when workers and students organized their vacations around the festival in a frenzied competition around who had watched the most films.
Forty-five years later, the meeting shed the complicated challenges of current circumstances and fate, and rose like a Phoenix.
On the festival’s opening day, its main venues suffered blackouts during the morning programming, increasing uncertainty among the public and the organizers about the course the event would take. Still, the 45th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema happened.
Havana welcomed more than six-hundred delegates from some forty-five nations. Over 270 films from forty-two countries were exhibited, from a selection of some 2,017 motion pictures received in the competition. México and Argentina were among the best represented.
Like a mantra repeated throughout the event, in its selection the Festival in Havana defended diversity, inclusion, and the profusion of perspectives and discourse that has been developing in Latin America for decades.
The emergence of these narratives sparks the interest of a knowledgeable, curious, and educated public who passionately welcomes everything presented each December.
Bit by bit and rising above adverse circumstances, such as the unrelenting blackouts or the disappointing state of the public transportation system that did not allow spectators to arrive on time at the main artery of the event,
the festival flourished.
The celebrated Avenida 23, which strings several movie theaters along its course, was the stage for a choreography of sorts, with moviegoers and onlookers going up and down as in the busiest of ant hills.
This atmosphere, so characteristic of the festival, was gradually felt in all of Havana.
A festival that is born of a deep, natural political need and of the many emancipatory demands of an entire continent could not turn its face to the urgent issues that humanity faces today. This is why, in an embrace of solidarity, the 45th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema featured a selection of films by contemporary Palestinian directors, reaffirming the condemnation of the genocide taking place in Gaza and nearby nations and advocating for its immediate end.
In this meeting in Havana, the imprint of the now fifty-year-old Committee of Latin American and Caribbean Filmmakers, body and soul of what is known today as the 45th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, covered with its indelible mantle the debates and meetings and in many cases called for a necessary re-founding of the group, which back then contributed to revitalizing the most revolutionary ideas within the continent’s cinematic work.
That necessary integration continues to advance through agreements and commitments signed with countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, Nicaragua, and Honduras, and collaborations with other nations of the continent and the world such as Russia.
The vitality at this event cut spanned areas such as the Nuevas Miradas (New Looks) space, which contributes decisively to the development and accompaniment of projects created by the students of the International Film and Television School of San Antonio de los Baños and, as in previous years, featured advisors renowned for their international achievements.
The film school, as it is commonly known among colleagues, has left a strong mark on this festival. An offspring of the New Latin American Film Foundation with a 38-year history of tireless work, the school exhibits the work of its best pupils each year, winning countless awards that validate the foundational wisdom of intellectuals such as Gabriel García Márquez, Fernando Birri, Julio García Espinosa and Alfredo Guevara, to name a few.
The Havana Festival, generous in its tributes, awards a Coral of Honor each year to those who stand out by cultivating and enriching relations among the continent’s countries and promoting the dissemination of its culture and roots. In this edition, the award went to Carole Rosenberg, the gallery owner and cultural promoter from New York who for the last 25 years has led the Havana Film Festival New York (HFFNY). There is an old proverb that says, “love is repaid with love” and Carole’s labor over all these years has been the result of her love at first sight of Cuba, its art and its people, beginning in the 1990s when she made her first trip to the island. Since then, HFFNY has become a space for exhibiting, enjoying, and contrasting the culture of the peoples of Latin America.
Another priceless moment was the showing of the film Nyad and the presence in Havana of Diana Nyad, the legendary open water swimmer who inspired the film starring Jodie Foster and Anette Bening. An afternoon filled with anecdotes told by its main character was a thrill for the audience, a reminder of the popular bridge between North Americans and Cubans, the challenge of linking Florida and Cuba through swimming.
The night of the premier of the first two chapters of Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude], the Netflix series based on Gabo’s novel of the same name, filled the popular movie theater Yara in two successive showings, since so many people were left outside after the first.
Spectators were engrossed in passionate discussions until the early morning hours about the staging of one of the major works of magical realism, one that Cubans hold very dear in their popular and cultural imagination.
Not only were the available movie theaters packed, but there were also movies shown in the neighborhoods, the streets, and an entire cultural program that ran parallel to the Festival offering films as well as the most varied rhythms and cultural manifestations that are born and flourish on this great Caribbean island.
On one of those nights, amid his many commitments, the nation’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, invited a group of judges, cinematographers, founders, and executives to his office to talk about the event and find out how it was going. His duties had kept him away from the Festival, but he wanted to show his support to the organizers and visitors, and assure them that regardless of the circumstances the event will live on, and Cuba will continue to be its pillar.
The night of the Corals began with an acknowledgement to the organizers, who overcame many obstacles and guided the event to its conclusion, giving genuine continuity to a meeting that has become a cultural highlight on this continent.
A prestigious jury headed by Argentine filmmaker Tristán Bauer had delivered their results. In a grand demonstration of the health and vitality of the film industry in our part of the world, countries such as Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Argentina received numerous awards.
La Cocina (The Kitchen), a Mexican-North American collaboration written and directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios, won the Coral for Best Film. A drama that takes place at lunchtime in a New York City restaurant, the film is a fitting visual metaphor that points to multiculturalism as another challenge of our time.
All this considered, the 45th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema has left yet another footprint on that multicolored, controversial path that gives shape to a tradition.
