Director Carlos Quintela talks about WCA, Cuban cinema and new projects

He won the WCA Jury award in 2013 for his film La piscina, two years later he was part of the jury himself. and in 2018 his film The Wolves of the East screened in our Cine Cuba focus. The Cuban director Carlos Quintela is a welcome guest! This year two of his short films can be admired in our GO CUBA! programme.

Time to ask him more about his work, Cuba and his experience with our film festival.

I don´t know how many films Go Cuba! has supported until today, but I’m certain that year after year the list of films increases. It´s a difficult task because they are dealing with a unique environment. In Cuba, it’s almost impossible to receive support for a film which is not linked with the Cuban Cinema Institute, an organisation controlled by a so-called communist state in a system which is in crisis. So the Cuban Cinema Institute supports only ‘pleasant’ cinema and sadly it doesn´t have strength.

I'm pointing this out because for Cuban filmmakers – especially on the island - it’s the only door to knock on. Thus, looking at the panorama, the Go Cuba! fund stimulates the Cuban cinema and gives it a new door or window to knock on. So, in a way, Go Cuba keeps these small productions alive and probably from ten or more years from now, as Cubans, we will realise how important they were in order to preserve plural audio-visual memories in a decade where the views are mostly biased by the official view imposed by the government.

At the moment there are certain decrees to develop the Cuban cinema, but we don´t have a cinema law or a real interest in arts yet. In my opinion, the arts in Cuba is still controlled by the government and they are mediocre, so the art they support tends to be like them (mediocre). We are really far from being free and understanding artistic freedom as a natural condition for artists. I think Cubans, in general, aren’t attached anymore to the Revolution, but there are a lot of people swallowed by the myth of the Revolution, including the filmmakers.   

Since a few months I´m preparing a project with Abel Arcos, again with Hernán Musaluppi in charge of the production. This time, with the experience of having been able to shoot my 3rd film outside Cuba, in Japan, I want to return to my culture and also go beyond the island’s borders. The story takes place in The Darien´s Gap, the jungle between Colombia and Panama where thousands of migrants from Haiti, Iran, Ghana, Palestine, Nepal and Cuba, etc. die every year during their odyssey to Trump´s USA. I hope to give life to all those souls that the jungle swallows through a character, called The Doctor. This character is a human trafficker who lives in this extreme environment transferring the migrants from Colombia to Panama. The story will have a mix of different genres, different languages, and cultures and deals with a huge international problem; migration. If everything turns out right, you will see it as soon as we have found the support that the project needs to realise it.

Nuestro tiempo, directed by Carlos Reygadas, is one of the few films that I saw last year that continues to come up when I chat about film. I think Reygadas found something deep regarding men’s behaviour through his images and sounds. As men today, we are living in a transition, and there are certain conceptions that we need to update if we want to face this new century. Men are more primitive than women, primitive as raging bulls. 

This film is really powerful and will be shown at WCA this year, so don´t miss it!

I think everything you pay attention to intensely offers you a lot of ideas for a film or at least for a note in your notebook or phone. One day that note melts with another idea. This moment is always unpredictable -  it could be from a life experience, maybe your feelings are involved, sometimes a sentence in a book, a painting in a museum, a graphite at the street, a WhatsApp group, social networks or whatever touches you profoundly: anything that has enough strength to ‘stab’ you will make you realise you´ve found material to work with. So, that material has to be strong enough to make you unplugged from reality and plug you in this fictional world that will swallow you up until it's done.

It was the edition where I watched a lot of great films that were at the start of their international distribution. To be a juror is a difficult task, there are a lot of categories, feelings involved, even extra-cinema points that you have to take into account before voting in favour of one film or another. It´s really nice to talk with the directors after the award ceremony, to impulse their careers, to give them a necessary push. 

I will share two new versions of El sucesor with the Dutch audience, a Cuban web series that was born last January as a political act, a coup d’état, but sadly ends as a state pinch. With El sucesor I tried to oppose the new Cuban Constitution which I think was another step to perpetuate the Cuban regime. Thanks to my crew mostly outside the island, the support of Go Cuba! and the execute production of Pablo Diaz Espí I developed this political project that was more important for me as a Cuban than as a filmmaker. In El sucesor Alberto Pujols was a fearless actor capable to play my version of the current Cuban president, Miguel Diaz-Canel. This 10th edition World Cinema Amsterdam will celebrate its first decade and it will be a pleasure to be part of it with these two episodes that probably will never be shown in Cuba until it changes.

Before I finish I will love to say that WCA has the correct size as a festival to invite a lot of people and make them feel like family members, I hope it continues like this.