This post back on Wednesday referring to a film by German director Florian Borchmeyer has garnered a lot of attention in Miami, mainly due to its exposure on the popular show A Mano Limpia earlier this week. I caught a repeat of the program last night, and based on the several clips the showed from the film, it promises to be a doozy.
A commenter to the previous post mentioned the words of Cuban writer Antonio Jose Ponte, and indeed his appearance stood out in the clip shown on the program.
Anyway, El Nuevo Herald writer Wilfredo Cancio Isla has a story in today’s paper on the film. It’s a long article and I don’t have time to translate the entire thing, but a couple of things stand out. First, the film was shot with the permission of the Cuban government, but the film crew was denied access to certain buildings, like the Teatro Campoamor. The film was shown at the Munich Film Festival last July, right before fidel transfered power to raul. This timing appears to be significant since the film was denied admittance into the Havana International Film Festival, not as part of the main festival, mind you, but as an entry in a concurrent exhibit on German films. It appears that the symbolism of Havana’s architectural ruins was too reminiscent of the impending collapse of another Cuban ruin…fidel.
Since then, the film has been shown in Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles, but was not selected for the Miami Film Festival later this month. Nevertheless, Borchmeyer plans to show the film in Miami sometime in April.
Here’s the link to the Nuevo Herald article.
Is it too early to write up a Fidel Castro is dead post? Ya know I want to be ahead of the curve when it happens.
It’s telling that the name of the movie is:
Havana: The new art of making ruins
That’s actually a quote from one of the people in the documentary who claimed that the presence of so many ruins could only be due to a new art of actually making them.
It’s telling that the name of the movie is:
Havana: The new art of making ruins
That’s actually a quote from one of the people in the documentary who claimed that the presence of so many ruins could only be due to a new art of actually making them.
My question is… Why wasn’t the film selected for the Miami International Film Festival?
I sent an email to the following people asking that same question.
MIAMI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL CONTACTS
Main number: 305-237-FILM (3456)
info@miamifilmfestival.com
Nicole Guillemet, Director
Carol Ann Lafferty, Managing Director
Elaine Parker, Corporate Relations Manager
Anabel Fariñas, Membership Manager
Lisa A. Mikolai, Marketing Communications Director
Melissa Martinez, Outreach Communications Manager
Dorothy Karvi, Festival Administrative Coordinator
Monika Wagenberg, Senior Programmer, Ibero-American Programming
Karina Rotenstein, Programmer – Shorts/Documentary/World
Carmen Argamasilla, Publicist
Weiman Seid, Fat Dot, National PR Firm
Bill Hill, Technical Director
Tom Davia, Assistant Technical Director
Valeria Sorrentino, Head of Filmmaker Services / Miami Encuentros Manager
Diana Sanchez, Encuentros Director
This “artsy” crowd was probably more concerned with the discomfiture that it might give the moribound Castro than with the discomfiture that the dictator has given the Cuban people for 48 years.
It might be interesting to look up the films that were actually selected for the Miami International Film Festival. Probably most are in the “I Pissed On My Mother” genre.