Cuba

The walls in the prison crumble revealing a past that has been covered by layers of thick yellow paint. Pain when left unvisited turns into amnesia, history cannot absolve everything.

Cubanos, a completely independent production, liberates itself from television convention to draw an impressionist portrait of the Cuban community. Sincere interviews and sequence shots reveal an identity fragmented by 48 years of dictatorship. The main character, Catuey, a Cuban musician who has been living in Québec for a number of years, brings to his journey and his songs the image of an ideal Cuba hurt by the division in its people and the group-think that prevails in Miami. While Catuey and the interviewees try to define themselves both as individuals and as Cubans, one scene at a time, the camera paints a broader, more complex portrait of a people held prisoner by their history. By exploring the richness of cinematographic language, Cubanos goes beyond the documentary genre to become a road movie that takes us to the heart of Catuey's struggle.

Every image tells a story in this sensitively crafted mosaic that captures the soul of everyday life in Havana. An irresistible soundtrack drives and narrates the camera's sensitive observations of the mundane and the unexpected with lyrics of love, longing and betrayal. A woman prepares a meal in her tiny kitchen, construction workers toil as people sing on the street, Fidel Castro appears on television playing the paternal role and majestic waves crash into a pier as the song cycle builds to a crescendo that always leads back to Cuba. This timely glimpse into the lives of ordinary Cubans under Castro was the last film made by director and DP, Fernand Bélanger. Knowing his time was limited, his camera is pulled to moments representing the essential pulse of life. Sadly, Belanger died before the film was finished, so the film was completed by his co-directors and longtime collaborators, Louise Dugal and Yves Angrignon.