Confiscated Uutopia (from the gravity of dreams to the lightness of realism)

This seminal essay interrogates whether the utopian potential of the post-revolutionary Cuban cinema has been lost in the 1990s. After identifying some of the institutional and sociopolitical changes that encouraged aesthetic renovation in the late 1980s (evident in films by Orlando Rojas, Juan Carlos Tabío, Daniel Díaz Torres, Fernando Pérez and others), García Borrero outlines various factors (including the crisis of the Left, Cuba's economic plight and institutional paralysis) that have led to an increasing level of atomization among younger film-makers (from Arturo Sotto and Humberto Padrón to Miguel Coyula, Jorge Molina, Pavel Giroud and others). The essay praises the work of younger film-makers as provocative while lamenting its lack of subtlety and self-reflection. Calling for more debates and more collaboration among film-makers in order to forge the type of collective poetics that undergirded Cuban cinema at its height, the essay claims that Cuban cinema's utopian promise can be recaptured.