The growing success of Cuban Film Institute’s relaunch of the Cine Móvil (Mobile Cinema) project last year is having an impact across the island. The initiative has its roots in the early days of the revolution, when ICAIC established a mobile cinema department, sending trucks equipped with projectors to some of the country’s most remote communities.
Octavio Cortázar’s short documentary For the First Time captures the wonder and delight of a community encountering cinema for the first time. This time around, a local organiser explained that, in Bayamo, “We have already reached several communities where the viewer has never actually been to a movie theatre before. Our intention is to take the movies out of the theatre and into the community.”
As electricity outages and lack of repairs have closed cinemas across the island in recent years, ICAIC has responded. Today, projectors and mobile cinema screens, including inflatable ones, are arriving in rural communities, town squares and former sugar-mill settlements all over Cuba. Audiences are enjoying films despite regular power cuts that plunge their neighbourhood into darkness. Not only using generators, a team from ICAIC and the film collective Rueda Producciones has also developed a system of solar inverters that allows screenings to continue using built-in batteries, charged by solar panels.
The project has revitalised public spaces from Havana to Santiago, kept culture alive and brought together young and older generations, with a diverse programme of films, including films designed for children and teenagers. Local cultural institutions have been able to expand the programme to incorporate music, theatre, dance, circus acts and involve local artists.
It is a revival of the philosophy of the original mobile cinema: “… when it sheds its seats and walls, it recovers its most basic and necessary function—that of being an encounter, a community, a shared wonder under the open sky.”
Initially, last summer, it started with a permanent screen set up on Lenin Hill in Regla, and another on 23rd Street between 10th and 12th, in front of the office of ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry), with their own generators, to be immune to power outages. Meanwhile the Mobile Cinema truck was reactivated, visiting communities, such as El Fanguito, on the outskirts of Havana. Gradually more mobile screens popped up in parks outside cinemas in the 10 de Octubre municipality. In Villa Clara, the inflatable screens went to the Quintín Banderas community in the Corralillo municipality and the Panchito Gómez Toro community in Quemado de Güines, as part of a tour of small, remote communities. In Santiago de Cuba, Mobile Cinema visited, among other communities, the town of Boniato and the San Luis municipality.
Also in Holguín, Granma, Pinar del Río, Camagüey, and Guantánamo, screens and video projectors reached wherever needed to provide a cultural and entertainment option during blackouts. In Guantánamo, for example, at the Huambo cinema, they took the projector out onto the porch and managed to bring movies to the audience.
Screenings and cultural activities took place at the San Carlos Cinema in Morón (Ciego de Ávila), the Jigüe Cinema in Corralillo, the Meca Cinema and the Hermanos Barcón Video Room in Pinar del Río, and the Ayacucho Cinema in Consolación del Sur, also in Pinar del Río. The Provincial Film Center in Granma managed to provide backup power to the Céspedes Cinema, and Camagüey did the same. More cinemas such as the Yaguajay Cinema (Sancti Spíritus), the Martí Cinema (Holguín), the Meca Cinema in San Juan y Martínez (Pinar del Río), and several theaters in Villa Clara also managed to stay open to show films using back up generators. Last year, the ICAIC announced more than 3,900 screenings had taken place in 180 cinemas during July despite energy difficulties, and with a record attendance of more than 128,000 spectators.
Report taken from from cubacineicaic social media and cubacine
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