Category: Havana

Really fascinating documentary on the life and work of Cuban writer and artist Samuel Feijoo.

The film tries to tell Feijoo’s life story in the style of his work, combining live footage interviews with animation in the style of Feijoo’s lively, frenetic, tangled illustrations. It allows the surreal to play with the everyday, with two interviews of sedate conversations in chairs being combined with animation of a turtle crawling its way through a disassembled and nonsensical stone structure. It is narrated by a mechanical pufferfish.

I have to say I knew nothing about Samuel Feijoo before seeing this, but now I think it’d be really interesting to read his stuff. He loved nature and folk culture, passions which stayed with him all his life. He saw the centres of culture not as the big cities or institutions, but in the countryside, among communities. There ideas intermingle with history, with mythology, with religion, with knowledge of the natural world, and stories and songs are invented and reinvented continually.

His written and artistic talent brought him to work at the University of Las Villas, and to become surrounded by the important creatives of his time. There he influenced and was influenced by the movements of his day, surrealism, plastic arts, and concrete poetry. He published magazines, first The Island and then The Signs, collecting the myriad artistic, critical and contemplative pieces being created. Essays, poems, illustrations and artwork all cohabited on the pages.

I loved how the film ended, choosing to portray Feijoo’s death as simply a passing into folktale, becoming part of the legends of the island. A really unique portrait of a distinctive artist.

Anti-authoritarian animation from Cuba.

Over a cracked and bleak landscape, a city is cut into crust of the earth. From above, rows upon rows of flat, interlocked square rooftops show the rigid and confining nature of life here. The people shuffle out, silent, uniformed, faceless as thumbs.

The only voice is that of their ruler, a figure in military greens, a red square on his cap, his shoulders. His confident, rageful voice bellows over the tannoys across the city, spewing his ideas as the only reality.

The people of the city spend their days at rows of desks, repeatedly stamping documents, punching them with a red square stamp. They trudge home past the block red posters. But one figure hovers by one whose corner is starting to come away from its wall, and there, a little white triangle cuts into the colour. And an idea forms.

The title riffs off the Cormac McCarthy classic No Country For Old Men, which in a very different way, also speaks to a sense of futility in a world filled with incomprehensible human violence. The animation uses Soviet iconography in a clear critique of Soviet authoritarianism, but its dystopian depiction of oppression of governance and labour is universally recognisable.

Beautiful, colourful, sensual, animated music video. Cool and slick, it contrasts music’s ability to ground us bodily while also being transformative and magical. So pretty.

We close out the Havana Glasgow Film Festival with Queens of the Revolution, and what a closer! Really interesting, really moving, really inspiring. It features the single most powerful drag performance I have ever seen.

Queens of the Revolution tells the story of queer liberation in Cuba, through the people of Mejunje, a queer cultural centre in Santa Clara. Mejunje means mixture, and was set up as a safe space for queer people to be as well as their allies. It was a hangout, for club nights, for music gigs, for drag performances, a place that could be used by the community for whatever they needed.

While every country’s path to queer liberation is different, most European countries were heavily influenced by Stonewall in the States, and you get queer rights movements developing alongside women’s lib and anti-racism organisation. Cuba’s history is a little different. They still struggled with oppression and formed grassroots resistance, but their timeline isn’t the same. Due to the Revolution, discussions about class and race were all happening simultaneously to that defining social event. And in its aftermath, there was a belief in the birth ‘the new man’, who lived for his community, who was not self-serving, who was a revolutionary. And that image was not gay and was not gender non-conforming.

The state repression of queer people in Cuba lasted right into the 90s. One guy talks about having been given a physical at his work, and being told he was HIV positive, and that just heralding his life being over. Because he lost his job, the government relocated him to a new settlement exclusively for HIV positive people. Which seems to have been set up as a temporary measure when they were still trying to find out how HIV spread but which quickly became a homophobic open-air prison. It was a ghetto, and if you left it, the only other place you could stay was jail. And he was there for 15 years. It’s unreal.

Mejunje helped him heal a lot. He says it’s the only place in the world he feels at peace. Everyone knows him there, everyone treats him with respect.

You have the Queen Mother, a trans elder, who was imprisoned repeatedly across decades. When she arrived in jail, being housed in a men’s prison, she was the only trans woman, so the other inmates dubbed her Queen of the Criminals. As more trans prisoners showed up, she took them under her wing, and got the name Queen Mother.

In some aspects, you have universal queer experiences, such as fear of rejection by family. Queen Mother was taken to psychiatrists repeatedly, for conversion therapy and other damaging interventions. Eventually she ran away from home, and when her father found her and attempted to take her back, she tried to kill herself. After that, her father decided to accept her rather than lose her, but it was an uneasy co-existence.

Nomi had a similar story, where her father refused to speak to her for 5 years, and then after 5 years said he accepted her as gay, but still wouldn’t accept her as trans. It’s clearly hard, but at least there does seem to be movement towards acceptance, even if it is painfully slow. Lola, on the other hand, says she was always accepted by her family, that she never was rejected. And while she’s experienced discrimination for being trans in jobs and education, she could always rely on her family for support.

For those without support Mejunje has been there. It was set up in 91, and its presence, the very fact that it’s not going anywhere, has opened Santa Clara up to the acceptance of queer people. Although a vital resource for the queer community, it is also a cultural centre for Santa Clara, so everyone is welcome. With it having such lively events, like drag performances, music and entertainment, it is part of the cultural life of the city and its residents.

You’d think with all the repression they face, the queer elders would be bitter, but, although the grief and trauma can be scalding, they remain dearly devoted to their homeland. They are proud Cubans, and lovers of the Revolution. But as people say over and over again in this film, revolution is eternal, it is continual, it is personal, it is one’s duty to work for the society they want to live in. For the Cuban queers in this film, Revolution wasn’t something that happened, it is something that is happening, it is how Cuba happens, with the daily decision of ordinary Cubans to strive to make the society they want to see, and they are working to make it a queer-inclusive society.

That outlook has a strong influence on how they view Cuban emigres, especially queers who fled persecution. You would expect that no one could understand more why you left than someone who suffered the same oppression alongside you, but there is a tinge of bitterness when talking about them. Because it is not viewed as some academic issue of loyalty to a nation state, but a very real and tangible sense of personal betrayal, that the community here was fighting for their rights, fighting for their very survival, and some people up and bailed. This is not on some intellectual level of political discourse, but a real heartfelt sense of being abandoned by friends, people you knew and were close to you, who knew just as well as you how bad it could get, and instead of staying in the fight and working to make things better, fucked off to somewhere where someone else had done all that work, so they could enjoy what they’d built there.

Still, if it was me, if my country locked me up for my sexuality, I might just say, Fuck this for a game of sodgies, I’m awa. For the queer elders in the film, it’s seen as cowardly, taking the easy way out. Personally, I think it’s a more than understandable choice to make.

There are so many personal stories in this. The people of Mejunje are so open, so raw. This is not a film that pulls its punches, showing the bad along with the good, and the trauma as well as the healing.

(Spoilers for the end of the film, maybe stop here if you’re already convinced to watch the movie.)

The film finishes on drag queen Crystal, on stage at Mejunje, talking about when they experienced a homophobic attack. A guy rushed Crystal and stabbed her half a dozen times in the neck and chest. She had to have 47 surgeries. She had over 200 stitches in her neck, and she thought that was the end of her singing, the end of her drag career, the end of her even being able to speak. And here she is now, back on stage, singing out and speaking up in her own voice, a survivor. And there she is, in her fancy outfit, her hairdo, and bling, and she starts to sing My Way. It’s a song which in recent years has been all too often co-opted by arseholes and narcissists (see Undergods as an example), but this is it delivered in the best spirit of the song. And as she sings, she takes off her rings, one by one, and drops her shrug. As the chorus swells she pulls the padding from her bra, and tugs off her wig. And as song hits its crescendo, she pulls down her top to reveal her torso covered in scars, the scars that were meant to stop her, the scars that could never stop her, as she stands before the audience shorn, naked, and vulnerable, and sings, “I did it MY WAY!”

Chills, tears and applause rippled through the audience in the cinema. It was an ending that just hit you full force in the chest. Such a great film.

A really lovely film about three friends kicking about on their roof. With that aimlessness that follows after leaving high school, it kinda reminds me a little of Ghost World. These pals spend their time talking shit and coming up with ideas of what to do with their future.

Victor Jose, nicknamed Vito, goes on about his supposed Sicilian ancestry. His grandmother told him his grandfather was a Sicilian who came to Cuba without a cent and built up an empire of businesses around their block. Although likely untrue, Victor has an entrepreneurial spirit, seeing opportunity everywhere, and never deadened by setback or disappointment. Over the course of the film he uses his resourceful Cuban attitude to build a makeshift pizza restaurant on the roof.

Anita’s already pregnant, which she seems surprisingly chill about. While she’s confident about being able to cope as a single parent, she’s wistful for nice things for the baby. She’s scrubbing up hand-me-downs of hand-me-downs, and it would just be nice to buy the baby new stuff.

Of the three of them, Yasmani is the most frustrated. Looking after his own pigeon coop, he struggles to see himself making it, being the first to find the flaws in Victor’s plans. He longs for the hot lassie on the terrace below, and gets snippy with the local grifter who comes by trying to sell clothes. He’s outward-looking, seeing with clarity what they don’t have. But he may be missing what he does have, including the quiet love of Anita.

The roof is basically just the close, but on top of the building. The kids use it to go from house to house, catching up on the news, helping neighbours, running errands. Everybody’s up there, hanging out washing, watering plants, or sunbathing. Victor, Anita and Yasma spend their time there bumming about, taking selfies, and practicing dancing.

While this film is about young adult rudderlessness, it’s not a film about impotence or hopelessness. The exact opposite, it is about resourcefulness, imagination, and the support of friends, family and neighbours. While the circumstances may be Cuban, the feelings are identifiable anywhere.

Well-shot and well-written, On The Roof is a film which excludes quiet camaraderie in the face of the difficult transition into adulthood. Really nice film.

Los Zafiros: Music from the Edge of Time is a bittersweet documentary about the Cuban band Los Zafiros, meaning The Sapphires. Rising to fame in the 60s, their popularity endures to this day.

Los Zafiros starts with very humble beginnings. A bunch of kids in Havana got together to sing and play guitar. There wasn’t much of a plan to it, other than they enjoyed making music and were delighted when they started to get paid for it.

As their popularity grew, and record deals loomed, they settled on the name Los Zafiros. They became huge in Cuba, and soon their fame spread abroad, doing tours of Europe, the Soviet Union, and all over. They got caught up in the lifestyle of fast-living, heavy drinking, and women.

Although they broke up in the 70s, the music of Los Zafiros had a lasting legacy in Cuba. It was iconic for combining Latin styles like calypso and rumba, with African rhythms, and the doo-wop style of the US. The combination was seen to convey a distinctly Cuban identity.

Alas, the band hadn’t long split up when singer Ignatio died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage, only in his 30s. Then bandmate Kike died swiftly of an illness of the liver. In the 90s, El Chino also passed, and the remaining members live in Florida in the States.

But although time takes its toll, their music is still played and appreciated by generations of Cubans to this day. A great legacy to leave as part of the country’s cultural fabric.

The last Arturo Sotto film of the festival, this one from 2014. It continues in his depiction of Cuba as full of shagging and domestic chaos.

I kinda thought with this one being a more recent film it wouldn’t have the same gapingly problematic nature as stuff from the 90s, especially in its treatment of women, but no. I don’t know if that’s Arturo or if that’s Cuba. Obviously it’s a comedy, so it’s gonna be a light-hearted take on sex, but even still, there’s plenty of scenes that are a big clanging yikes.

Anyway it’s an anthology of comical stories told through the framework of citizens of Havana trying to sell their story to a writer who will put them in a novel or film. There, he judges their worth and pays according to his estimation of their value. The writer is played by Arturo Sotto himself, the film’s writer and director, so as to make the obvious metaphor more obvious.

This first story is of a couple of harassed parents who try to keep their daughter’s wedding day from flying from the rails. Beset by increasing misfortune on the morning of the wedding, the chances of getting through the ceremony start to dim. A funny little farce, in which a every member of a the family is a horny hot disaster.

The second film is of two bungling crooks who attempt to flog a stolen antique trunk, not realising there’s a guy passed out in inside, inebriated. After being chased by the cops, and hoodwinked by hookers, and scammed by gangsters, they finally unload the trunk for barely any cash, and are stuffed when the buyer tries to leave the country, causing the sleeping occupant to be charged as an illegal stowaway.

The last film is of a femme fatale, who tells the story of how she blackmails a university student into sex after falsely accusing him of sexual harassment in the workplace. Yeah, I know. The writer likes this story best, pumps her, and sends her off with a Modigliani hanging on his wall. Ew.

I find the writer character insufferable, and this is maybe my least favourite of Arturo’s films. The comedy works in some of the stories better than others, but it just didn’t do much for me.

After the pandemonium of the other Arturo Sotto films shown today, Mantis Nest came as a bit of a surprise. A more or less straightforward murder mystery, with a love triangle and a noirish bent.

It’s bloody brilliant too. Really compelling, keeps you gripped.

Elena has, since childhood, inspired the love of two men, Tomas a humble worker and revolutionary, and Emilio who comes from a family of wealthy, middle-class American emigrees. Love and fortune keep them running into each other over the years, forcing Elena to choose and choose again.

The movie itself is set in contemporary Cuba when it was made in the 90s, and Elena’s story is told in flashback over the course of the film. Because… dun dun duh!… all three of them appear to have been murdered by their daughter Azucar. Or perhaps by Elena in a murder-suicide designed to put an end to their heartbreak once and for all.

Elena is clearly an allegory for Cuba, being torn between two vastly different men who love her dearly. The constant interruption of the war as a seperator of the couple(s) makes clear that this tug of war between the different ideologies is for possession of Elena, the island.

But Azucar also becomes a symbol of Cuba, taking after her mother, but the Cuba of the next generation, the kids born after the revolution and wars have been settled. Elena grows desperate to spare her daughter the torment that she has perpetually faced.

Stylistically smooth, with humour lifting the drama, the writing and performances make believable the idea that a woman could keep two warring lovers in close quarters, where hatred as well as love means they can’t leave, turn away, or accept defeat.

Also, I take back everything I said about the French being over-sexed, the Cubans have them beat. From watching this movie, you’d think that their biggest gripe against the Americans was how often that nuisance keeps them from fucking.

Thoroughly enjoyable movie, Cuban noir with the classic femme fatale.

Breton is a Baby is directed by the same guy who did Vertical Love, and seeing the real Cuba in this documentary explains a lot about why that film is so mad.

Cuba is weird.

The director, Arturo Sotto, takes us on a tour of Cuba, and seeing it with his eyes, you understand why he is given to surrealism, because there is nowhere so surreal as Cuba.

When Sotto is commissioned to do a documentary with the remit and title of ‘The Cubans’, he is overwhelmed with the impossiblity of capturing the totality of Cuba’s people, a place where, as he puts, “the history always exceeded the geography”. So he throws it open to Cubans, and asks the public for their suggestions of what should be in it.

Man. Seriously. Even the stuff they reject, or not so much reject but don’t have time for, is bizarre as fuck. The famous revolutionary goat killed by police for spreading socialist material, by wearing slogans on its horns, and is now preserved in its own museum display to recognise its martyrdom. The legendary cow known as White Udder, whose milk production was so renowned they built a statue of her, and folk in the town hung up pictures of her in their house. The forensic anthropologist who has brought a mummified body home and gave it a glass coffin in the back room of his home, something he denies vehemently is the reason his wife left him. Dude, that house is so haunted.

So what follows is a road trip, taking you across Cuba, and meeting its people. Like the giant painting on the side of a mountain in Vilanes. And the dude who works there as a tour guide and has trained his massive ox to snore and hold its breath. Like the auld yin clamouring into a coffin with a wee window and being lowered into the ground for the annual celebration of the Burial of Pachencho in the village of Santiago de las Vegas. And being ritually resurrected by a mouthful of rum to the face. Like the city that was built around a nuclear power plant, and now it’s closed down, the nuclear physicists and engineers have become farmers in the shadows of the abandoned high flats. Like the Haitian-Cubans who hold voudou ceremonies, and the Pentecostal Cubans who hold church services, one being ridden by the lwa and one being ridden by the Holy Spirit. Like the adventures of the bell from Manzanillo, whose ring declared the start of the revolution, and that got kidnapped and handed to the old president before it was liberated and returned home. Like the young guy in the mountain who basically invented electricity for his neighbourhood. With no infrastructure, he decided to set up a bike and dynamo to power his radio, which became a wooden waterwheel tipped with tin cans, and eventually became a self-invented hydropower for 20-odd homes in this village in the mountains where there isn’t a mains plug for miles. Like the indigenous village on the mountaintop, still passing on the old ways to the few hundred people left.

Suddenly Sotto’s films don’t seem so barmy. Honestly such a strange and interesting road trip.

Cuba is weird.

This film is *b*o*n*k*e*r*s*.

Do you remember films from the 90s that you loved as a kid, and when you rewatch them as an adult, you’re like, this is problematic as fuck? Of course you did, that describes every movie from the 90s. I’m thinking of something like Overboard, which I laughed my head off at as a kid, and then as an adult was like, the plot of this is about a man who uses a woman’s brain damage from a head injury to have sex with her and use her as his personal maid out of spite. Like, what the fuck? Vertical Love is like that. You’ll have a great time as long as you just don’t think about it too much.

The meet-cute between the two characters is when a low-level orderly poses as a psychiatric doctor to a suicidal patient because he finds her very fuckable. Yeah.

Estela is a willful architecture student in Havana. Havana in the 90s had major housing problems, with there not being enough quality housing to go around, so multiple generations were effectively living in one room shacks. This situation is pretty much what is being lampooned in Vertical Love, with there being no privacy for a shag, especially for young people dealing with parental disapproval.

Estala has a dream house she wants to build, but is caught up in red tape, and gets so frustrated at the government office she slits her wrist. If this sounds unhinged, just understand that in the world of this film, this merely shows a passionate nature.

Ernesto is an absolute dog. A part-time projectionist, and part-time orderly, he is meant to be in a relationship with this woman Lucia, who he treats like dogshit throughout the film. He uses her for food and board, cheats on her and gaslights her, and goes back to her back and forth giving her hope. He uses his job at the hospital to fuck attractive patients (which is like, wow), egged on by his mate who is a doctor, and seems to live vicariously through his conquests. The doc fixes him up with Estela, giving him his white coat so Ernesto can bag her.

Ernesto tries to convince Estela that she is far too fuckable to kill herself. Her family, consisting of her father, uncle and grandfather invite home for the dinner the valiant doctor trying to save her life.

Estela is a horny virgin trapped under the roof of her strict father, who is determined to defend her chastity. Her uncle is a priest, eager to uphold the Church’s values. And her grandpa… well her grandpa is a creepy, randy perv, who seems only to have not went after Estela himself due to confinement to a wheelchair. He spends the film constantly asking to see Estela in the scud. (Bonkers!)

Her dodgy old grampa reads Playboy while lying in bed between his two adult sons, and is the first to alert Estela’s father to the sound of hanky-panky in the next room, where Estela seems to be sleeping in a giant pink crib. (What the fuck?) He demands to be carried to see what’s going on.

While Ernesto manages to charm Estela’s family at first, he tells a bawdy joke, earning the disfavour of her father, and when he is caught trying to deflower his virginal daughter later, they are both cast out the house.

Estela clocks Ernesto’s deception pretty promptly, picking up on clues like him suggesting that next time she needs to cut up her vein rather than across, which is not advice normally dispensed by mental health care professionals. However, because she’s wired to a Mars Bar herself, she finds his entirely scoundrel behaviour charming. Thus begins the first half of this film where they try to find a room to shag in.

A sort of sex farce, it has them being chased out of various places by interfering busybodies and chances of fate, each more ludicrous than the next.

An insane movie, and that’s all without mentioning the conjoined twins, the full-length nude softcore porn scenes, and the escaped lion.

Bonkers, bonkers, chocolate conkers.