|
By Fabiola Santiago. fsantiago@herald.com.
The Miami Herald, April 30,
2002.
As Video de familia (Family Video) rolls, a cantankerous family in Cuba is
prepping to tape a video to send to their exiled 30-something son in Miami.
The family has not seen ''Rauli'' in the four years since he fled the island
on a raft.
The mother sweetly but awkwardly talks into the camera, using the language
of old-fashioned letter-writing protocol. The grandmother immediately asks Rauli
to send her all kinds of pills for her ailments. The father, a faithful
Communist resentful that his son left his homeland, is grudgingly going along
with the taping when the older brother walks in half drunk, and the younger
sister, all decked out in U.S.-hip-hop hoops and braids, drops a bombshell on
the group.
''Rauli is gay,'' she says.
Poignant and humorous, tearful and revealing, this story of a contemporary
Cuban family torn apart by exile, politics and intergenerational family
dynamics, is the headliner of a ''minifilm festival'' of short Cuban films being
staged Wednesday through Sunday at Miami-Dade Community College in downtown
Miami.
Organized in a matter of days after permission to travel here was obtained
from the U.S. and Cuban governments for a key filmmaker, the Festival del Cine
Sumergido (Festival of Submerged Cinema) will showcase scores of contemporary,
short ''alternative'' films made in Cuba by a new cadre of 30-something
filmmakers.
The up-and-coming director of Video de familia, Humberto Padrón,
already here to attend film festivals in Boston and New York, and Jorge Molina,
whose dark films have generated a cult-like following on the island, will attend
the showings and discuss the works with the public.
Molina, in fact, is curating the program and choosing all the short films to
be shown. They range in subject from heavy-duty sex, to murder and death, to
life in the countryside.
''More than reflecting life on the island, which these works do, they
demonstrate that there's a peripheral production happening [apart from the
officially sponsored], that people do manage to make their shorts with what they
have,'' Molina says in an interview from Havana. "They are shorts made in
schools, or in television centers, or made in some way independently.''
His own films, Molina says, are made with his funds, with help from friends
and ''some'' from the International School of Film and Television in San Antonio
de los Baños, where he works. Padrón's film was made with the
support of Cuba's official Film Institute (ICAIC).
Alejandro Ríos, director of the Cuban Film Series at Miami-Dade
Community College and organizer of the event, says the films show a daring new
generation is pushing the limits of censorship.
''These young filmmakers have ventured into reality zones where
professionals are not allowed to go -- or where professionals don't want to go
because they don't want to take the risk,'' Ríos says. "Established
filmmakers want to create films that make it to festivals and win prizes, that
allow them to travel abroad. These young people are not sponsored by the
official cultural institutions of the island. They borrow the materials, they
borrow the editing time at the booths of the Cuban Film Institute. What they do
have is an intense will to produce art.''
A sampling of the shorts: One looks at the lives of a group of women who
never married and live alone in the countryside. Another follows a couple who
borrows a motorcycle to go to a posada, a dingy motel that people in overcrowded
living quarters rent to have sex away from their families.
Some of the films contain graphic sexual content, Ríos warns.
''They portray a very crude reality,'' he says. | 
