Still from "Tent City", courtesy of Filmoteca de Catalunya
Activity
Wednesday April 7, 14, 21 and 28 of 2025
Memory is a Shattered Landscape
Independent Cuban film series
in progress
Through films that explore exile, censorship and memory, this Cuban independent cinema program features filmmakers who question official narratives and reinvent images of resistance with an intimate gaze. Curated by José Luis Aparicio, it takes place every Wednesday in May with the presence of the directors.
Obsessed, like Chris Marker’s character, with understanding the function of memory, in the last two decades the independent Cuban film has touched on some of the most critical areas of the country’s memory. With hauntological intent and a rigorously intimate view, this body of work has questioned the dominance imposed for more than sixty years on the national film imagination, as well as totalitarian control of history.
In La obra del siglo [The Project of the Century] (2015), Carlos Quintela explores the ruins of a utopian project: the Juraguá nuclear power station, planned in the eighties and abandoned after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In A media voz [In a Whisper] (2019), Patricia Pérez and Heidi Hassan use audiovisual letters to reconstruct their experiences of exile and rootlessness, the increasingly blurred memories of their distant country. Back on the island, Daniela Muñoz journeys to the east in search of the spirit of Mafifa (2021), one of the few women to play on the conga scene in Santiago de Cuba.
To close the series, we will be showing two shorts by Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde recently restored by Filmoteca de Catalunya, intimate and collective records of a national rift that continues to this day. Apollo, Man to the Moon (1970) and Tent City (1980), the first and last of the films made by this creative duo in the United States, are essential parts of the cinema of the Cuban diaspora. Created on the basis of a cross between experimental cinema, fiction and documentary, the Villaverdes’ work is a fundamental predecessor of today’s Cuban avant-garde film.
Always produced on the edge, between scarcity and prohibition, the films that make up this series are a small sample of the dissimilar aesthetic searching used by independent Cuban film to subvert official narratives, reread or expand the archive and create their own policies of memory. They bear witness to the film-makers’ enormous sensitivity in finding, in the ruinous wasteland of a failed society or the vicissitudes of exile, fertile ground in which to reinvent images of the island.
Curated by José Luis Aparicio.
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participants
José Luis Aparicio 
Coco Fusco 
Heidi Hassan 
Daniela Muñoz 
Patricia Pérez 
Carlos M. Quintela 
Fernando Villaverde 
Miñuca Villaverde 
From May 23, 2025 to January 11, 2026