IV INSTAR Film Festival

The INSTAR Film Festival is an annual event organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR). The festival supports independent film production on an international scale, especially in countries where freedom of expression and creation is threatened, and favors daring aesthetic and thematic approaches, as well as hybrid pieces that explore new paths in filmmaking.

The fourth edition of the festival will take place during the week of December 4–10, 2023 in multiple venues around the world, particularly in cities with a significant Cuban expatriate community: Barcelona, Paris, Miami, New York, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo. The concept guiding this edition is the transnational character of the new Cuban cinema, and its growing dialogue with other cinematographies.

For the festival’s activities in New York, INSTAR collaborates with e-flux Screening Room on Saturday, December 9 to present a two-part program featuring a selection of contemporary and historical works of Cuban experimental cinema, introduced by Tania Bruguera. The first session of the program proposes a dialogue on diaspora and national identity based on two shorts by Alejandro Alonso, an award-winning documentarian working today, and a pair of shorts by Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde, an exiled filmmaker couple who were involved in the New York underground film scene of the 1970s. The second session will present the North American premiere of Rafael Ramirez’s first feature film The Winter Campaigns, considered by several critics to be a milestone in Latin-American avant-garde cinema. The premiere will be followed by a virtual Q&A with the filmmaker.

Film Program

Session #1 | 3:30pm

Miñuca Villaverde, To my father
1973, 22 minutes
United States

The filmmaker visits her moribund father, an old Cuban expat, one last time. A phantasmagorical home movie about the sadness of dying far from home.

Alejandro Alonso, El hijo del sueño (The son of the dream)
2016, 9 minutes
Cuba

The filmmaker’s uncle, Julio César, left Cuba for the US in the Mariel exodus in 1980. For the next fifteen years he tried unsuccessfully to reunite with his family, until he contracted HIV and disappeared without a trace.

Fernando Villaverde, Apollo, Man To the Moon
1970, 27 minutes
United States

Life and lives in New York City, sights and sounds of its streets and its people, at the time of man’s first landing on the Moon.

Alejandro Alonso, Home
2019, 12 minutes
Cuba

The nation is born and dies in a constant cycle, shifting towards the most intimate memory: the first home.

Session #2 | 5pm

Rafael Ramírez, Las campañas de invierno (The Winter Campaigns)
2019, 70 minutes
Cuba-Venezuela-México
Followed by a virtual Q&A with the filmmaker

In a house, in no man’s land, a videogame player lives with his family. Other characters move through this concentric empire, agitated by an omnipotent force. The player questions his role in what he understands as a war between Reality and Language. The Great Adversary develops his strategy from a distant world, a place populated with a system of spheres, maps, and embryos, where he controls the march of his armies.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility                
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.     
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.              
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.