The actor Luis Alberto García dedicated the honorary Lucía de Honor award given to him by the Gibara International Film Festival to the Assembly of Cuban Filmmakers and stated that “Our cinema will be free or it will not be.”
In his acceptance speech this Tuesday, spread on the networks by Yamila MarreroGarcía also remembered the writer anathematized by the regime Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
“For me, on a personal level, it is an honor to receive this award in Gibara, which is the land of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, it is the land of Luis Catalá, whom I just played in a film a few months ago. And it is also the land of my brother Armando Capó,” the speech began.
Likewise, he had words of gratitude for the late filmmaker Humberto Solás, founder of the festival.
“But it is also the place where Humberto Solás decided to make magic. This Festival was called the Poor Film Festival. And now Gibara International. It is the place that he chose and that, luckily, you keep alive. Because dreams stay alive,” he said.
“How wonderful it is to be young, Solás was 27 years old, only 27 years old when he made this marvelous film that is Lucy, which is what this award is called, released in October 1968, 5 months after the events of May 1968 in Paris,” he added.
Based on this reasoning, García referred to the Assembly of Cuban Filmmakers that demands a series of demands from power, based on the censorship and unauthorized exhibition of the documentary. Issue, by Juan Pin Vilar.
“Young people have an immense capacity to dream, and to believe in utopias, and to bring them to fruition. That is why today I have two of my daughters here (I have 4). "I have always wanted my daughters to learn that you have to learn to fight for your dreams, that when you believe in something you have to fight for it," she said in the theater where the Festival awards ceremony took place.
“That is why today I want to dedicate this award to a group of young people, girls and boys, who have restored my faith in these days, and who are teaching me that it is worth fighting for the ideas that one holds, for the ideas in which that one believes. I share this with the Assembly of Cuban Filmmakers,” he stated amidst the applause of those present.
“It doesn't matter that at the moment they don't understand me, it doesn't matter that at the moment there are suspicions that make us invisible. I want to share my prize with all those girls and boys. Our cinema will be free or it will not be,” he concluded amidst the closed ovation of the theater.
In addition to García, the Lucía de Honor was awarded to Violetta Cooper, a costume designer from Holguin with extensive experience in Cuban cinema.
In June, a public letter signed by more than 50 Cuban filmmakers rejected and criticized the decisions made by authorities of the Ministry of Culture that exercised censorship, manipulated and violated the copyright of director Juan Pin Vilar, by preventing a scheduled exhibition of his documentary “La Habana de Fito” and counterprogrammed it on Cuban Television against his will.
From this fact, the Cuban filmmakers articulated themselves in the Assembly and They have met with Cuban leaders to whom they have expressed their frustration.
In July, it came to light how the meeting that officials from the Ministry of Culture (MINCULT) held with this Assembly to discuss the case of censorship carried out against the director Juan Pin Vilar, ended with a tense confrontation motivated by the prohibition of recording the meeting. .
“They have to stop treating dissidents that way. They have to stop censoring,” Luis Alberto García claimed in a speech at that meeting, in which he recounted the films and moments in which Cuban cultural authorities have exercised censorship.
What do you think?
COMMENTFiled in:
