EICTV

Three stories about men and women in terminal situations.

Sergio Abel lives in a small town in Central Cuba and he videotapes his life. He is also a grade school teacher. A beautiful documentary that incorporates Sergio’s observations and footage and his student’s aspirations for the future with the outsider’s eye to tell his story.

Jean Remy is a Haitian man struggling to find employment in Dominican Republic. Confronted with rejection and discrimination in the city, he sets off to try his luck in the countryside. Imbued with a naturalistic grace, this deeply sympathetic portrait speaks eloquently to the trials of humanity.

On the shores of a desolate beach in Cuba, the tide cycle begins, a shark hunter, from the ritual of fishing, experiences the strongest symptoms of his condition and nature.

An experimental film about that one hypnotic moment on a regular, unassuming Tuesday when one realizes that time has stopped and the universe has been sucked into a single smile.

A group of Cuban fishermen work along the Cuba-US marine border area (Santa Cruz del Norte-Florida), and are involved with political issues and ongoing illegal migration. Yet they try to continue their normal fishermen life in their country.

On the stage of a destroyed theater, we saw a play in which Elizabeth, Mercedes and Crisalida, three black women at different stages of life, relive everything they suffered from the interpretation of their own conflicts in the form of inner monologues.

An outcast makes a journey through a dam in Sierra Maestra, place of origin of the Cuban Revolution. As in a short story, we are guided through this attenuate landscape gradually crossing the delineae cartography of a body that with every movement is diluted, finally becoming one with the habitat.

In an attempt to get closer to his father, Leonardo starts filming him in his everyday life. As days go by, Esteban notices the camera and uses it as a means of communicating with his son.

What can represent the confinement for a person. The emotions, changes, uncertainties and traumas that are generated in a space/situation limit. Place from where a particular form is constructed to see the life and the freedom.

Susana Barriga’s documentary, the illusion, begins with violence. A long shot reveals a man standing on a street corner, his features indiscernible in the night. He moves out of the camera’s line of vision, but the filmmaker, persistent, moves with him as the jostling of the camera marks her steps. As we learn moments later, the man in the distance is Susana’s father – and this is the clearest image of him we will have. Suddenly, an angry British man demands that Susana cease filming. Susana protests in heavily accented English, “He is my father!” Glimpses of a man’s torso are followed by blurred images as the camera spins rapidly over surfaces. The image cuts to black. A new male voice asks in carefully spaced out words if Susana would like him to call the police. When she doesn’t respond immediately, he speaks louder, as though volume would compensate for the language difference. She gives her name; she refuses the offer of an ambulance.

Yoli always lived with her mother in a humble neighborhood in Havana. Until one day, a boy invites him to leave and Yoli decides to wait for him, trying to change his routine, even if it is for a day.