Cuban Independent Cinema: Migration, Diaspora, and Transnationalism

This program brings together a group of filmmakers whose work has been shaped by two visceral obsessions: the experience of migration and the shifting of national borders toward an in-between space of precarious globalization. Their films, produced between 2018 and 2024, document various crises—of individual and collective identity, migration, politics, and material conditions—while attempting to forge a collective memory that, like almost everything on the island, needs to be reconstructed to heal the deep wounds inflicted by the failed national project of the Cuban Revolution. These films transform those wounds, absences, and exiles into cinematic material and into stories that inhabit an alternative archive of the Cuban experience, marked by the relentless struggle to simply survive. 

Introduction by Nils Longueira Borrego (CS Fullerton). Following the screenings, Nils Longueira Borrego and Felipe Vara de Rey (CS Fullerton) will engage in a discussion with the audience.