Imperfect Cinema Transformed: Independent Cinema in Cuba in the 21st Century

Abstract

We’ve arrived in 2016 at a situation already imagined by Julio García Espinosa back in 1969 in his polemical essay For an Imperfect Cinema when he wondered if the evolution of film technology (there were already signs) would make it possible that it ceased being the privilege of a small few. Indeed, when digital video came to Cuba as everywhere else, it produced the rise of independent production outside institutional norms. Despite the problema of internet Access within the country, there has been a process of transnationalisation at the aesthetic level which does not seem to have occurred in institutional production. Independent documentary, for example, is strongly marked by a turn towards the personal and subjective, and the question arises about its political implications, especially given that political conditions in Cuba are rather different from the rest of Latin America (not to mention Europe). Nevertheless, the situation is much the same as elsewhere, in that production is perfectly posible, while distribution remains problematic. It is not the first time that the paradoxes of making films in Cuba demonstrate the contradictory features of global cultural production.