In conversation with Alexis Triana president of ICAIC
Through 2024 the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) has been leading a collective celebration of its 65th anniversary. In Cuba the international film short festivals have followed one another, while in various parts of the island old cinemas have been restored to once again contribute to their communities; strategic alliances have been established to help preserve Cuban film heritage, and during the summer 400,000 people attended cinema screenings in the capital. But ICAIC is also focussing on getting new films made.
In October Alexis Triana Hernández, president of ICAIC [since November 2023], spoke to Cuban culture magazine La Jiribilla about the future of Cuban cinema and its creators.
If you had to capture the last five years in an image, what elements would have to be in that frame?
It is very difficult for me to talk about the last five years, especially because in the middle of that there was COVID that practically dismantled creative forces. And I think that the colleagues who were then in charge of ICAIC made an extraordinary effort to get “solidarity productions” going, to link filmmakers, producers, to work under those conditions and to produce documentaries and films that today are very important because they mark the end of the inertia that caused people to stay at home for fear of catching the virus.
I think that what was done at that time deserves full recognition. I think that creating a testimony of our scientists developing vaccines, the idea of filming the deserted streets, documenting the circumstances of COVID – which today everyone wants to forget, but is a concrete fact – not only for children, but also for those involved – to show how filmmakers had to be able to leave their homes, how the cameramen came out, even the scriptwriters had to work with reality to be able to document the evidence of such a difficult period. For that reason alone, it would be worthwhile to celebrate the heroic effort of those colleagues.
Unfortunately, this period was followed by a period of poor communication with some technicians, producers, and filmmakers, and for exactly a year we have been trying to rebuild the communication infrastructure, ensuring that the institution once again has its own synergy. Without a doubt, the fact we are starting production in volume marks a before and after.
We have started rolling
In the last 3 months of 2023, ICAIC again received funding that allowed the cameras to be put into operation. It achieved something as significant as the film Stress; really the only major film production of the year. And it must be said that it was done on a low budget, with a truly extraordinary effort, demonstrating that it was possible to work in those conditions.
In Stress, filmmaker Marilyn Solaya reflects our reality seen through the nuance of a film director; It is practically a mosaic of Cuban society today, with characters with whom, I am sure, people will really identify. This fact, in 2023, makes a difference, it signals that you just have to make film.
On Mesa Redonda [Cuban TV discussion programme] a month ago we talked about how we started 2024 by focussing on how to get films shot [despite the shortages]. Already today ICAIC has almost 100 simultaneous projects being developing in the last 12 months, including documentaries, animations, pre-productions.
Stress faces a very difficult moment in time, how we are going to do the post-production, since we have to pay in foreign currency to be able to carry out this process abroad. It is only abroad that we can finish post-production because the blockade prevents us from doing it from here right now. The blockade does not allow us to work with updated licenses that enable us to complete the film. It is really painful, because Stress is practically ready but the state cannot yet give us the hard currency for it; because the state has to decide between the boat delivering chicken or liquefied gas, how to buy oil to keep the power on… Imagine having to give that currency to be able to finish a film abroad!
Faced with this situation, we decided to continue asking the government for this essential aid for Cuban cinema and to use the budget in national currency assigned to us to fund a film by Jorge Perugorría with Mirta Ibarra, a film by Gerardo Chijona; the film Performance by Jorge Luis Sánchez, and at the same time, we set in motion a whole series of films, which show it is possible to shoot in these circumstances despite the fact that transport and food have doubled our costs, triggered inflation and increased the costs of the films.
However, we managed to get Rudy Mora to finish the film ‘Calle 262’ and to do the post-production in Mexico, which he is doing at the moment. We managed, for example, for Roly Peña to film Nora right now; ensured Santana made his film, which in my opinion is an avant-garde film, we will see, it consists of stories told of life in Havana, as HabanaSelfie did. We managed to finish ‘El camino’, which had its filming by Cuban Television cut due to budget problems. We hope TV will take it up again and that we finish the film together in collaboration. That film tells the story of very significant moments in the country from the perspective of young people, and what they think about the development of the political and social events. Everything I’m telling you — I’m trying not to miss anything out — is to show that we’ve really started rolling.
In other words, we are no longer just talking about what we are post-producing. Right now we are going to premiere ‘Canción para Laura’, something very different, which is about the play by actor Laura de la Uz, and which is practically finished.
We are hoping to re-release Ñancahuazú, by Jorge Fuentes, on 1 January (day of the triumph of the revolution). With films and documentaries already finished, we want to do the same thing we did recently with ‘Maisinicu, half a century later’, a documentary by Michel Lobaina, which was to tour it right across Cuba, it was seen by thousands of viewers and also shown in Washington USA, at the Cuban Film Festival in that city.
I can also report we have started pre-production of ‘Teófilo’ by Alejandro Gil; in the same way that we began the pre-production of Performance, by Jorge Luis Sánchez, in Nicaragua; something that also makes us very happy because we are even scouting in Nicaragua to attempt something as sacred to us as making the series The Common Cause there. It is a utopia of ours to try, we do not have the full financing for a project of that size, and yet we have decided to do small production scouting in Nicaragua, in Honduras, in Cuba in the Baracoa area, and we are going to start that pre-production and look for links between these stages, ensuring that the process is not paralysed and that we can reach a point of making films that involve the cinematheques and film institutes from Nicaragua, Honduras, Cuba and other friends who are thinking of joining.
It is the same as with Teófilo’. Mosfilm Studios have confirmed they will co-produce this film that evokes the figure of Cuban boxer Teófilo Stevenson. It is not a biographical film, but nevertheless it will transmit to new generations what Stevenson meant in the history of world Olympic sport.
I have to be enthusiastic. In the Mesa Redonda [TV programme] we reported on the films underway and some colleagues commented that we were excluding Stress and other films that were at a different stage. Not at all. What we were simply saying was that we made the difference and we started rolling. A film institute has to shoot, it has to make films, even when there are different stages, because for a film to be seen this entire process has to happen.
Imagine our dilemma, if the money that the state gives us right now is to maintain the projectors – something that is already going to begin to happen in Circuit 23 [cinemas around 23rd street] – which are DCI technology, laser, which we can only do with technicians from abroad, because it is truly a whole system assembled that guarantees the projection of the first world in the cinemas of Project 23 when the 45th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema [Havana film festival in December] takes place. What can we do?
Do we ask the country for money for the films, or do we ask for the money to acquire the video projector that is going to be installed in the 23 y 12 cinema, at the headquarters of the Cinemateca de Cuba, to guarantee forever the best projection of all those films that we have achieved this year? Because if we stop to think and look at the cycle of seasons of international screenings, we will realize that we have had Japanese, French, Colombian, Venezuelan, Italian cinema, that is, it is continuous, we do not stop.
The spirit of socializing cinema
What has happened in Havana is a different vision of cinema. We want that to happen on the best screen, with the best projection. We want to roll this out across the country and convince the governors, persuade those who have to handle the decisions today, because we have to do what Pinar del Río did with the Praga cinema, which was completed repaired and we were able to support it by providing the video projector. Or what Santiago de Cuba did, restoring the Rialto cinema, which is a jewel; they deserve praise. We have to expand that spirit of restoring cinemas, as Villa Clara achieved, where there are cinemas that do not even have a cine projector but they have a data projector. There are 14 cinemas in Villa Clara that have technology and projection, and they don’t just have televisions.
We need to begin with the fact that we are talking about a country that had 500 cinemas open in 1959 and that today, with a struggle, has 183 operating. We have to look at this differently. We have to get support from local government, even if they have many problems too, as we all have. It must be understood that the cinema is the theatre of the community, that the cinema is also the place where main events are held, from meetings of People’s Power [local council] or the Party, to activities for children and pioneers. We have to revive those cinemas, wherever they are. And we have to, above all things, raise awareness that Fidel did not found the Television and Video Theatre Programme for nothing.
We cannot give up until we recover that spirit of socializing cinema, until we revive the Mobile Cinema, until we return, in the main spaces of Cuban television, and I say the main ones, to the idea that teaching cinema is a heritage; for example in the past on the TV were great filmmakers teaching us: Enrique Colina in 24 x second, Mario Rodríguez Alemán in Sunday’s Shootout. We recognise there are great films programmed on TV today, but we are talking about something else. The only way we have to confront cultural colonisation is by teaching how to watch cinema and videos, even the best video, in the face of the current wave. That is why ICAIC is committed today to revive international film festivals, of all kinds and from everywhere.
The feat of restoring Cuban cinematographic heritage
I am excited, and I have to express how I felt seeing the first two animated films about Elpidio Valdés that we have just restored. It is an unprecedented event. We have managed to get Aventuras de Elpidio Valdés and Elpidio Valdés contra el tren militar digitally restored with full quality at the Colombian Film Heritage Foundation. We have been able to do it because they acquired the scanner, they managed to make that investment. We have not yet been able to do it – more than 170,000 dollars are needed for it.
But in the meantime we made alliances. We have made an alliance with Trimagen, as a company, here in Cuba, which I know is going to be transcendent. But at the same time we have made an alliance with the Colombian Film Heritage Foundation, and with our friends in London, who made possible the Cuban Film festival [Screen Cuba] in London; Rob Miller and his brilliant team. There they sold tickets and they raised 3000 pounds sterling that were transferred to Bogotá and, with that money, with that little money, they restored two very important documentaries by Jorge Fraga about the Central American Games in Cali, Colombia, and the two animations about Elpidio Valdés.
I was in tears in front of the screen, not because of what has been done, which we are going to show in Havana in December as a preamble to the Film Festival, but because of everything that remains to be done. How we will restore the work of Humberto Solás, how much remains of our great filmmakers that we cannot allow to be lost.
As you will see, they are alliances and acts that we have to recognize everywhere. For example, 28 cans of rolls of Cuban films appeared that were in a room in New York, from the New York Havana Film Festival. There is The Last Supper, by Titón [Tomas Gutierrez Alea]; and a film by Julio García Espinosa, incredible…
Thanks to the Cuban patriots who live in Tampa, we managed to get them to contribute, to donate the payment of 1600 dollars to take those cans from New York to the vaults of the Mexican Film Institute, where they will receive maintenance, helping to preserve that heritage, to restore it. Every Cuban, wherever they live, should support this project to restore Cuban cinema heritage; and I am not only talking about the heritage of ICAIC, I am talking about cinematographic heritage in its entirety. That’s why I mentioned Fraga’s documentaries about the Central American Games.
It’s like the support we’ve received from INDER [Cuban national institute of sports] to make the Teófilo film. We have that big job today, and that relates to what we have been talking about for the last five years.
I believe that we must recreate ICAIC as a social interlocutor, like the ICAIC that made newsreels shown every week in cinemas, like the one that with Pablito Ramos created the children’s film event throughout the country and the world; that is, we have to return to those utopias.
We are doing Segundo Piso again…which means the return of the singers and musicians to ICAIC’s second floor, where the Sound Experimentation Group was born; and we don’t mean just a show or a concert, [but to make that music important throughout the work of ICAIC].
Our projects are about that. I’m talking about five years where we have to recreate what ICAIC was, more than a place where cinema was made, it was a cultural centre where visual artists, poets, singer songwriters, felt that they were part of a legacy for other generations.
That was what I felt just a week ago, when Liuba María Hevia and Silvio Rodríguez went to the ICAIC Animation Studios to see the latest video clip of the song ‘El papalote’ by Silvio. Having filmmakers again alongside Silvio in person, with Liuba seated… We immediately asked Liuba to donate the material to us so that we could show it on the Day of Cuban Culture [20 October], at the Yara cinema and in other Cuban cinemas, and she gave it with great pleasure; that is, to return to what characterized us…
I am convinced that it is our duty, it seems to me that it is the only thing that can reconcile us with the present. There was no other way to celebrate the 65th anniversary of ICAIC, said Manolito Pérez.
Notice that we are at the gates of November and we have managed to get the ICAIC 65th to be talked about the whole year. That is why I want to thank UNEAC very much for dedicating their Caracol event to this anniversary of Cuban cinema, which is not just any anniversary.
That is why I am celebrating that the Jazz Plaza Festival is also dedicating itself to the 65th anniversary of ICAIC. That makes us proud, that it is being made more visible even, through such a valued festival of music heritage.
That was what I felt when we went to Trinidad with Manolito Pérez and the team that made ‘Maisinicú possible, half a century later’. Michel Lobaina, a young filmmaker, going and seeing how his work, his documentary, has travelled all over Cuba, the delegations of the MININT in several provinces, the combatants of the different forces were the first to be faced with the fact that we were evoking the first 50 years of the film The Man of Maisinicú. And we have not stopped until Michel Lobaina in person, in Washington, at the Busboys and Poets venue, has shown this film to the American public. We are going to continue like this.
A true film festival
We are going to get Cuban cinema to return to the main theatres of the world. Right now, regarding the celebrations for the Day of Cuban Culture, we convene under the slogan “Celebrate the Day of Cuban Culture with cinema” in our embassies. A month ago, we received fifty of our ambassadors in a good part of the world at ICAIC and we asked them for these actions.
That is why you can simultaneously see what is happening in the Cinemateca de Venezuela, in Caracas the Cuban Film Week has just been inaugurated; in Nicaragua, at the Cinematheque; but Barbados has also gone to the University of the West Indies, to the Faculty of Creative Art, to exhibit the documentaries of Alejo Carpentier; or Panama, which screened A Night with the Rolling Stones, on October 20 at the Embassy.
I could mention many more who are joining this that is already beginning to be almost a true film festival. In other words, that our embassies, that our foreign relations system, once again understands, reassumes and makes that cinema its own, for me is a very significant fact. I can tell you how many countries, at this moment, 35 countries are exhibiting Cuban cinema to mark the Day of Cuban Culture. And for me this is important, and how are we going to make it even more. That is the ICAIC in dialogue, demonstrating that cinema is also a weapon of our diplomacy, re-establishing that system of relations.
As we did with the MININT, we want to do with the MINFAR [armed forces] to ensure that a documentary that we have about one of our great warriors, Quitafusil [by Rigoberto Senarega], is shown wherever there is a military school, wherever there are comrades from our army.
We have to socialize our results, we have to ensure that Cuban cinema reaches our different social sectors…
We traveled to Moscow at the invitation of the director of the Russian Film Fund, who participated in the Russian Film Week that we held here. In Moscow he invited us to examine the film archives. There, we found 75 Cuban films on 35mm, in excellent condition. Films that we had even lost, such as A Girlfriend for David, which had been totally destroyed, and is there in its entirety. We found Capablanca complete, after Manolo Herrera has been suffering for years for the fact that his film was missing two rolls, and we made a digital version of the film, we reconstructed it so that Manolo Herrera could go to Villa Clara to meet with the chess players, to see Nogueiras, our Grandmaster. Well, we have it in Russia in its entirety, as we also have The Age of Enlightenment.
And therefore we have reached an agreement with the Russian Film Fund, which may mean digitizing all that heritage and giving it back to us. A good part of Juan Padrón’s work is intact there. And the Russians have managed to preserve that to the point that they have proposed to us to make a Cuba Collection, so that Cuban cinema is saved and protected in that region.
ICAIC: A Cultural Movement
Those are our challenges today, to modernise ICAIC. To ensure that it is not a white elephant there on 23rd Street, but that it re-establishes its relationship with its artists and filmmakers, its relationship with society, to once again lead processes that also belong to it in its own right. I think this can happen in the future. In our administration, we have been in office for just 11 months, I can assure you that we have not done anything new, that what we are doing is reestablishing what the ICAIC was. What inspires us are those previous generations that are the living memory, that continually compels us.
I remember a phrase by Manuel Herrera in the middle of a debate: “We were a cultural movement”; we can return to that idea, but that does not mean that all filmmakers agree or agree with us, or the producers or the technicians.
I believe that everyone has to defend what they think, and what they believe, and act on it; especially if it is for the good of the sector. What is important is what we agree on, where we can build consensus. Because there is no doubt that the latest government decisions that have been taken – and we are already talking about a Policy of Attention to Cuban Cinema – thanks to the budget that the country delivered through the Ministry of Finance and Prices, is that we can now talk about these facts.
The country, in the midst of its circumstances, gave a budget to shoot films, and we have therefore used it. I’m remembering right now a documentary I saw on the Educational Channel, where Titón suddenly begins to say that we forget that this is an island, an underdeveloped country, and that to aspire to make art cinema you have to shoot first, you have to make a lot of cinema.
A country that aspires to have one or two masterpieces has to make 30 or 40 films in a year, and we are already working simultaneously on almost 100 projects. Of course, even if independent cinema has their own paths for production, they need new spaces for the films to be seen. As a result of dialogue we are proudly bringing films today to our screens that are independent cinema, national films, because they are filmmakers who see themselves in Cuba, who want above all to show their work.
I think that the Summer Film Festival demonstrated this, not only the celebration of Cuban cinema, we put provincial cinemas back into operation, with cinemas across the country having a common programme. Suddenly, almost 400,000 people returned to the cinemas.
The hostile media, said that this was our lie, that we were inventing statistics. Well, cinema, circus, theatre, music, returned to cinemas. And that caused more than 400,000 Cubans to go to the festival, in the midst of energy shortages.
The simultaneity of the challenge facing Cuban cinema
I have to applaud the People’s Power in Rhodes, who painted their cinema; to recognize those who maintain the Jaguey Grande stadium, in Matanzas, restoring the cinema there, the roof was put in place and there is a group of promoters and businessmen working together because they could not bear Jaguey Grande to not have a cinema. And they are asking for films from the ICAIC. I think that’s a model, that’s an example of what can be done. The same in Baracoa, where the government completely restored the cinema; or in Granma, which is another example of how cinemas can be restored with the support of the government. Right now in Santa Clara, another of the communities did not have the money for cinema technology, however they repaired windows, painted the cinema, put up the new sign. I believe that this is what it is all about, … we need to at least fix pieces of the problem that we can fix.
That’s how I see ICAIC. I see it as simultaneously having a huge problem, bigger than ourselves.
However the heritage is worrying, the way it deteriorates. We live in a tropical country, where heat and humidity destroy acetate, turn it into vinegar. How do we manage to stabilize those vaults [of the film archive]? Every Tuesday we hold a meeting to discuss the state of the vaults, what temperature they have. All we are debating today is how we maintain those 60 thousand cans that will be lost if we do not digitize them. Imagine why we need a scanner. And that is as important as whether or not cinema is produced; or whether or not cinema is distributed; or if it is effectively possible for the screening to transcend the borders of ICAIC.
Faced with this multitude of problems, fixing pieces of the problem is the only option we have today. Therefore, I can say that we did the job for the 65th anniversary of ICAIC to be alive all year round, and we feel that the ship is going, that the ship is moving, and that little by little, many who did not believe in what we were proposing, are getting on the boat and proposing new departures.
There is nothing that excites me more than a colleague telling me: “this is the project of the Documentaries department that was lost”; Jorge Luis Sánchez, by the way. How is it possible that ICAIC has stopped making documentaries? When that was the place where the great Cuban filmmakers were trained and trained, they all started making documentaries. Or the success that has just happened to us by making the Gibara Film Festival, or the one that happened in Santiago de Cuba with the Santiago Alvarez International Documentary Festival. In other words, we are recovering gradually. We are at the gates of the 45th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema. I know that it is going to be a great event. We are going to keep the same ideas we had last time, we are going to reach out across the island, we are going to make a program for all the cinemas in Cuba, we are going to make sub-venues wherever there is technology that allows projections.
We are also inviting great figures of cinema to come to Cuba. Not only from cinema, but to recover that idea that whoever made the Brazilian soap opera of the moment came to Havana. The great actors of American cinema used to come to the Festival. We are recovering the idea that the word ‘festival’ is a party, and we have the duty to add everyone we can to that party. To come out of the shell of ICAIC, to leave the cinemas of Havana, to ensure that the spirit of seeing another cinema, Latin American cinema, accompanies us; or the best cinema, universal inspired by Latin America.
There are great surprises that I cannot reveal, but I am sure that they will shake the country, because we are going to be the stage, again, of great events; as it characterized us, like these previous generations of whom I spoke.
Imagine how difficult it can be for me to take on this responsibility as a journalist and cultural promoter – which is what I always am – when my father, who is the founder of the ICAIC, took me by the hand to the first years of the Latin American Film Festival. Imagine what the life of the institution can mean today, for the independent filmmakers who feel that commitment to ICAIC, what it means to create that festival and how not to let it die. And how to return cinema to the town square, rather than thinking you have to go to Havana to see films. I think that the most stimulating thing is that Cuban cinema has all these challenges all at the same time.
Cuba 50 
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