With few screening rooms and precarious means, the once prestigious cultural festival is in complete decline
14ymedio, Natalia López Moya, Havana, 14 December 2024 — A journalist takes notes on the terrace of the Hotel Nacional in Havana while interviewing an Argentine film director. At another table, an actress poses for photographers, and, in the beautiful garden, a feature film producer asks a young cameraman to take several shots of the Malecón. The unreal bubble breaks as soon as you leave the imposing building that brings together the main guests of the Havana Film Festival.
“I have come for more than 20 years almost every December, with the exception of the break due to the pandemic,” a Latin American reporter who prefers to remain anonymous tells 14ymedio. “This year I have been very affected by the low quality of the Festival and the number of beggars that are seen around cinemas and hotels. I have not even been able to sit down and enjoy a coffee because immediately someone arrives asking for money or food.”
With a credential hanging around her neck, which opens the doors of all cinemas and parallel events, the freelance journalist has been attentive to every detail. “The first problem I came across is that the press release, which used to have all the information very well organized, is a disaster this year. They don’t even put the time accurately because they don’t know when the electricity will go off and they’ll have to suspend the projection.”
“The Festival has shrunk; now it’s only on 23rd Street”
“The Festival has shrunk; now it’s only on 23rd Street. The screenings used to be in other neighborhoods or in the Glauber Rocha room [municipality of La Lisa], for example, but that no longer exists,” she points out. The event has taken refuge in a few spaces where “a lot of the Cuban audience can’t come because of the fuel problem.”
For independent journalist Luis Cino, a collaborator of Cubanet, the reduction of screening rooms is a serious problem for the Havana cultural scene. “What kind of film festival is this in a city where out of 138 cinemas there are only four left (Yara, Charlie Chaplin, 23 and 12 and Acapulco), all in El Vedado, which is almost impossible to get to due to the lack of buses?”
To the few venues included in the program must be added the impairment caused by blackouts. “We arrived at the 23 and 12 cinema to see the movie Matar a hombre, by Orlando Mora Cabrera, and everything was in the dark. There was no poster or anything explaining if they were going to show it another day, a total lack of respect for the public,” says Anthony, 23, a student at the Enrique José Varona University of Pedagogical Sciences.
Together with his friends, the young man also spent an afternoon in front of the Chaplin cinema and was surprised by the red, green, white and black colors of the Palestinian flags hanging on the facade. Outside, an employee with a sad face urged passers-by to enter. “There were four cats in the main room. We went in to sit down because we were tired, and the others who were there were people who use the cinema to sleep because they don’t have a house.”
“The only moment of festival enthusiasm was the premiere of the series One Hundred Years of Solitude in the Yara,” says Anthony. “There were a lot of young people and it was nice, but the rest of the venues have been pretty dead. Almost all the theaters I entered were practically empty.” From a generation that consumes audiovisual material mainly on mobile devices, Anthony believes that “with this lack of charm, they will not attract people to the festival.”
This year not only were the places for the screenings limited but the event brought together only 110 films in competition, 89 fewer than last year, from 42 countries. Cuban productions of numerous filmmakers who have emigrated in recent years were missing from the festival. Their works either have been censored or they have decided not to present themselves as an act of protest over the lack of freedoms on the Island.
“I find it shameful that today someone sits down to quietly listen to the false speeches of violent men, liars, proven abusers and verified human rights violators,” said producer Claudia Calviño on her social networks. She and her husband, the independent journalist Abraham Jiménez Enoa, have been exiled. “Those who sit there (in the same place from where combat orders are given), to listen without question, without recognizing the suffering of the suppressed, are, in fact, endorsing impunity and oblivion.”
“It gives the impression that no one believes this and that they have put on the Festival so they can say that they did not suspend it”
Her attitude coincides with that maintained by Eliecer Jiménez Almeida, resident in Miami and director of the documentary Veritas (2021), who explains without mincing words his absence on the Billboard of the Festival. “Until Cuba freely exhibits the films of Orlando Jiménez Leal, Néstor Almendros, Jorge Ulla, León Ichaso, Iván Acosta, Miguel Coyula and a long list of directors among which I include myself, I am not interested. Solidarity for me is a matter of principle.”
To cover up the obvious reduction in venues and films suffered by the event, the official organizers placed platforms and sales kiosks along the main avenue of El Vedado and a stage at the intersection of 23rd and 12th streets for musicians and audiovisual materials. Public bathrooms outside the Chaplin Cinema increased the feeling that they were attending a carnival or a street fair.
Playwright and poet Norge Espinosa complained harshly about these additions in a text published in Café Fuerte: “I wonder what Alfredo Guevara would say about his poster plastered everywhere, with closed streets for musical presentations, gastronomy and a street-carnival atmosphere, in search of an image of what is supposedly popular. The festival never needed such things, nor the portable public toilets placed in front of the ICAIC [Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry].
For filmmaker Armando Capó, director of the film Agosto (2019), the diagnosis is very pessimistic. “The film festival has no soul. It has lost it despite the effort of its work team. This has been achieved by speeches that rewrite history. The annulment of Cuban filmmakers. The idiotic carnivalization of the spectacle.” In his opinion, the event “looked like a representation for foreign filmmakers, a staging for the authorities, needing to hear what they want to hear. A parallel reality where the Assembly of Cuban Filmmakers does not exist.”
“It gives the impression that no one believes this and that they have only put on the Festival to say that they did not suspend it,” Anthony considers. For the Latin American journalist, the immersion in the event has left a deep and sad impression. “The filmmakers are fed up and very upset. I talked to some who told me that they were not even going to go to the closing because they already knew what it was going to be: official speeches ensuring that everything went very well, when the truth is that the Festival is broken, completely broken.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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