The Cuban stand, “Cuba en Corto”, returns once again to the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, with a selection of twelve films. Under the auspices of the French Embassy, through its Solidarity Fund for Innovative Projects (FSPI), and the work promoted by Iroko.org, a platform for the promotion of Cuban cinema, these films are brought together in our way of feeling the new Cuban cinema: transnational, diverse, critical and personal.

The selection includes well-known authors such as Heidi Hassan, Alejandro Alonso and Ariagna Fajardo. Twelve short films in which the formal boundaries between fiction and non-fiction are diluted with the exploration of new aesthetic and production methods, as well as territorial boundaries: a cinema of the diaspora that pushes the limits of identity.

They inhabit rural spaces already known in the island’s cinematographic imaginary, but this time told from the voices and gazes of the LGBTIQ+ collective in “Jíbaro” (dir. Osmanys Sánchez Arañó) premiered at the Invisible Film Festival 2023, “Matar a un hombre” (dir. Orlando Mora), and “Mancha” (dir. Jazz Martínez Gamboa) which was part of the co-production space La petite fabrique in 2023; or approaching the difficult subject of vicarious violence in “Cuando el viento” (dir. Lisa María Velázquez).

This year’s curatorship highlights the concern for registration, seen in two very particular ways. Firstly, the films “Al final del camino” (dir. Ariagna Fajardo), premiered at the 44th International Latin American Film Festival, and “En San Isidro” (dir. Katherine Bisquet), made in the urgency of the economic and political crisis in Cuba, bring us closer to a militant cinema in its need to show the present with its most pressing conflicts, and the recovery of its most recent memory through a direct and personal register, excluded from the official Cuban narrative. Meanwhile, the films “History is written at night” (dir. Alejandro Alonso) premiered at IFF Rotterdam, and “Souvenir” (dir. Heidi Hassan) return to their own register, turned into an archive by the distance of migration, to rewrite the uprooting and loss of the native home; or to ask the questions that, from the criticism of the romanticized gaze of the foreigner, we ask to explain ourselves better.

Another film, “Example #35” (dir. Daniel D. Saucedo, Lucía Malandro), premiered in Jihlava 2022, and with an extensive tour in international festivals such as FICValdivia and True/False 2023, digs into the Cuban judicial archives to retell the stories of nonconformists and dissidents on the margins.

But one character takes center stage in this selection: youth. A youth that is sometimes immobile, sometimes active and nonconformist, that dances until it gets lost as in “Teteo” (dir. Aurora D’Errico Prat), – the only film made by a foreign filmmaker; that loves in many ways and above all, loves nostalgically, as in “To all the girls I could’ve loved before” (dir. Adolfo Mena Cejas), or that, as in “Futuro” (dir. Amanda Cots, Angel Suarez), waits for the day of departure in the midst of the calm that announces a storm.

“Cuatro Hoyos” (dir. Daniela Muñoz Barroso) is the Cuban film included this year in the Official Selection of the Clermont Ferrand International Short Film Festival, after being premiered at IDFA. Here you can sense the strength of the new Cuban cinema: the encounter with the other, the rural space – outside the city, migration, questions about the past and the future, what happens outside the frame and challenges us to change our gaze and the place of emotion.

From this short film we bring to words these images. In the dry Spanish land, turned into an improvised golf course, José Corrales prepares to swing the ball. Before, he looks at the camera, with his dark glasses, and says: “I give it to you”. He is addressing to Daniela Muñoz, Cuban director behind the camera, while we witness the game of cinematographic image.

Cuba en Corto brings together these films, conscious of the importance of making (new) Cuban cinema visible in the most prestigious spaces of international cinema. The actions to connect filmmakers with industry professionals are complemented by a market screening that will take place on Thursday, February 8 at 4pm at the Georges-Conchon Theatre and will include the titles: Souvenir, To all the girls I could’ve loved before, Cuando el viento, La historia se escribe de noche and Futuro.

From the movie screen, the faces of its protagonists are watching us with the same old curiosity of José Corrales and seem to “dedicate” to us their uncertainty, their journey towards adulthood.

Carla Valdés León