Archivistas Salvajes 1. Cuban Experimental Cinema: Games of Language, Diaries, and Urban Drifts

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This programme brings together key works by two of the most singular figures of Cuban independent cinema, Manuel Marzel and Juan Carlos Alom, who emerged from the Sigma Cine Club and Cuba’s alternative production circuits. Moving between playful appropriation, film collage, documentary exploration and poetic observation of everyday life, these films engage with international experimental traditions while maintaining a distinctly local gaze. The programme offers a journey through recovered materials, personal diaries, urban gestures, and formal experiments that expand and question cinematic language.

A sensory portrait of central Havana capturing the city’s atmosphere and daily rhythm. Through wandering observations, the film constructs an urban symphony that reflects both transformation and continuity within the cityscape.

A Sunday afternoon in the neighbourhood: apparently nothing happens. In this stillness, humorous observations unfold, in which the trivial becomes poetic, turning the absence of events into the film’s central narrative material.

Inspired by José Martí’s diary written during his journey from Cap-Haïtien to Dos Ríos, the film merges historical memory and personal impression to evoke both the journey and the figure of Cuba’s national hero through a contemporary, fragmentary lens.

Inspired by Norman McLaren’s techniques of direct animation on film stock, this short film constructs a collage from randomly obtained fragments subjected to multiple visual interventions. The result is an abstract, playful narrative infused with humour and suggestion, close to a Dadaist spirit, accompanied by music from Villalobos–Gismonti and Eva y los Pecadores.

Through numbers, symbols and street gambling practices, this film observes how numerology and superstition permeate everyday Cuban life. A visual essay seeking meaning in the seemingly banal, revealing the hidden poetics of urban experience.

The director rescues the final reel of a supposedly lost crime film, though its original soundtrack is beyond recovery. The result is a deliberate play with cinematic language that humorously questions narrative conventions and representational codes. An irreverent homage to, and parody of, bloody thrillers, Godard and even Madonna’s pop imagery.

Archivistas Salvajes is supported by the British Council in partnership with the Independent Cinema Office.