Independent filmmakers in Cuba: from the anonymity to the female gaze - Ips Cuba

Poco a poco las directoras, guionistas, productoras, sonidistas y editoras cubanas han ido marcando territorio dentro del cine independiente. Colocada tras la cámara, la mujer lo primero que hace es observarse a sí misma por sí misma o a través de sus iguales.

Intuitively or consciously, a filmmaker knows that the male look (Male Gaze) has not seen it, but has built it as the subject he wants to observe for his own pleasure, comfort and tranquility.Pleasure, because that kind of look conceives it as a sexual object;Comfort because it uses it subordinated to the domestic roles that attributes and ratifies it;And tranquility not to have to deal with a "hysterical", a "whore" or an "inverted", that is, far from the danger of hallucinated castration by Freud.

It can be said that none of these concerns is legitimized by almost any of the Cuban filmmakers who do their own from creative independence models.

A quick look at a production landscape where the prominence corresponds to the filmmakers, would allow to verify that there are several ways to approach great issues that also go through other audiovisual creation sectors.

We could venture three major fields of thematic approach: the social internal through the questioning of reality, or the denunciation of certain phenomena;The external, expressed in emigration, and the consequent ethical-political conflict;and a third field focused on the intimate, introspective-existence;frustrations, loneliness, old age, repressed sexuality, erotic fantasies.The frequent intersections between these three thematic territories generate peculiar subtalpics of very rich expressive connotations, both at the scale of content and at formal scale.

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Among the most interesting works that I can remember is The Illusion (two008), by Susana Barriga, an unavoidable reference for later filmmakers who have also considered rummaging in the bleeding sore of emigration and its consequences.

Through this autobiographical thickness documentary, Susana goes to meet an exiled father in London, an opponent who dreams of returning when there is democracy on the island, and that puts her anti -strist paranoia before the emotion of seeing her daughter again after many years.A typical feature of independent production is that, often script, photography and edition in charge of who directs.Being such an intimate testimony, filmed with a hidden chamber, the nature of the theme defined the form of its content: the alternation between the blurred images achieved in underground, and the visual record of everyday life;All in the opaque gray of a black and white, more emotional than physical.

The theme and that Rayano style into minimalism, make The Illusion one of the most unique, emotional and polysemic works of all independent production made in the last two0 years in Cuba.

From that same time Data looking for Havana (two007), where its director Alina Rodríguez denounces the miserrimic conditions in which many people who emigrate from the eastern region of the country to Havana live as a result of the terrible economic crisis during the so -called special period.Using a more conventional story.In that sense looking for you ... overcomes any other documentary that would have ventured before in that line.

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Conectada por su sobriedad ética, con el ejercicio de neutralidad expositiva que caracterizó a los documentales de Estela Bravo, Otra isla (two014) de Heidi Hassan, observa la vida de una familia cubana, liderada por Sabina, una señora perteneciente al grupo opositor Damas de Blanco.Sabina and her closest relatives have received asylum in Spain following government agreements, but their expectations about emigration were frustrated.

Hassan is not limited to the political picture that this family represents, since the chronological monitoring of the filming for several weeks, reveals aspects of the internal family dynamics where micromachisms are reproduced, and the precariousness and immaturity of the group are undressing to face the challenges imposed on them exile.The activation of mechanisms of visual anthropology is an additive that thick the artistic result of this documentary.

Perhaps more suggestive and at the same time hermetic presents the work of Maryulis Alfonso. La voz over capitaliza el monólogo interior de una cuarentona que sueña a color con una vida rosa, lejos de su realidad cotidiana que va del sepia al gris, bajo el asedio de una madre controladora y tóxica, en Las ventanas (two014).

That same mother, youngest, reappears in Resin (script by Angela Guillén) co -raising with her emotional park and her accused silence, the awakening of sexuality in a young girl aimed at menarche, in a rural corner of Cuba.The theme of puberty appears again in Sirenas, also in a bucolic populated.What the three women of these shorts have in common is the vertigo towards loneliness either by sexual self -repression, routine or an unfathomable panic to life.

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One of the strongest personalities within women's audiovisual realization in Cuba is that of Yaima Pardo.

En two014 se presenta como guionista y directora de Off_line, un convulsivo y cuestionador corto sobre el limitado acceso de la población cubana a la internet.The following year, on the skin as canvas (co.Say.Naty Gabriela González Calderón) Cala in a subject that takes tattoo artists from anonymity.

Su siguiente documental Antígona, el proceso (two015) co-dirigido junto a Lilian Broche, es el resultado de la intersección de varios metatextos donde dialogan el ensayo de la puesta teatral, el texto dramático de Rogelio Orizondo y la autoreflexión creativa de un grupo de mujeres que asumen todas las especialidades del cine: fotografía, sonido, edición, música, en un despliegue de sororidad productiva.

Pero donde Yaima se gana el bono de los censores es en Causas y azares (two018), documental que desborda el tema sobre el activismo, comunidad o movimiento LGBTIQ+.

Underlined on the agenda of causes and hazards, other conflicts such as the individual versus the mass also appear;The censurating political apparatus, the diverse social classes and identities, the lack of autonomous expression spaces of different social groups, government strategies to reproduce and maintain controlling power in all instances, attempts at transformations by disregarding the claims of civil society;Freedom of association with legal amparo ..., free access to the media ... The spontaneity of activism not monitored against verticality and authoritarianism, the historical apology not pronounced by the chapter of the work fields of the military support unitsto production (UMAP, 1965-1968) and other social issues that transversalize and exceed sexual orientation and identity.

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Women's cinema can be explained as a voluntary deframatization in the narrative of audiovisual contents, a deliberate disruption between form and substance, between silences, sounds, image, voice over, music.As well as the return to the visual pleasure of self -compliance, which does not focus on the sexual organs but on sexuality all of the female subject.It is the place where the paradigms of male domination are unlocked.

Por ejemplo, la reivindicación del apetito sexual femenino, negado en los foros misóginos mediante su invisibilización, se recupera en El patio de mi casa (Patricia Ramos, two007).The director and screenwriter uses the entire symbolic repertoire with which the Cuban woman unfolds, vigorizes and supports domestic monotony.

We penetrate the mental self -rule of an old woman whose libido serves as a refuge for her physical decrepitude;Simultaneously, in her own mental evasion the protagonist is released from the burden of everyday life.The spider web on his head to hang clothes, returns it to red Divan where his naked silhouette reveals the sensual intensity of his inner pleasure.If in the fantasies of his grandmother the male factor needs to be present, for the young woman the release emanates from her autonomous ability to feel and be;The generation of it no longer resorts to a dependent heteronormative sexuality to nurture its imaginary louble.

That can also be the metaphor to understand the break between the thematic and stylistic models offered by the film tradition of the state Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematographic Industry, dominated by socio -transcentralist concerns, and women's cinema;A look that no longer pays the founders, or tribute, or patents.Its main gain is the way in which its history is braid, with the contribution of all;Today there is already a mattress of antipatriarchal references for those who hold the camera for the first time.There is no excuse to make an ankylose cinema.

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En two015 Jessica Rodríguez logra rodar un largometraje de ficción titulado Espejuelos oscuros, donde por primera vez un discurso artístico enfrenta las categorías mujer y nación desde la relectura de los símbolos, la ideología y los dogmas que por mucho tiempo las hicieron coincidir en las viriles alucinaciones de sucesivos gobiernos.

It is the boldest, rebel, challenging and iconoclast cinematographic work that I know by an independent director in Cuba.Evident female gaze, impossible to push within any thematic tendency.A Killer serial, a gay slender and a fucking mambisFalocentric.

Dark mirrors is La Lucía (1968) of our time, a work that synthesizes the capacity of women's cinema, assimilating and manipulating traditional narration models, adapting them to an antimachist content, in order to demolish and spray the patriarchal orthodoxy of theCuban identity.

Sin espacio para mencionar muchas otras realizadoras que merecerían aparecer en una antología sobre un tema poco explorado, me conformo con una última mención a Heidi Hassan y Patricia Pérez, codirectoras de A media voz (two019), filme ganador del Premio al Mejor Largometraje Documental en la edición 3two del Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Ámsterdam, Holanda, del Coral en idéntica categoría en el 41 Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de La Habana, y el Biznaga de Plata a la MejorSayección en la edición two3 del Festival de Málaga. (two0two0)