The images gathered in this programme stand apart both from radical experimental impulses and from militant, pedagogical cinema intended to mobilise the masses. Instead, what emerges are modest yet persistent records: films born from an attention to the nearby, to everyday gestures, and to the celebrations of seemingly small towns shaped by larger collective histories.

For more than three decades, Sorelio Hernández, known as Pucho, a trumpeter and candy seller from Bejucal, constantly filmed life in his town, as well as the journeys he undertook with the folkloric group Tambores de Bejucal, founded together with his brothers. Without the intention of producing finished films, Pucho simply accumulated images: neighbours, carnivals, religious rituals, farewells and celebrations. Within his reels, times, events and faces intermingle, forming an involuntary archive where the intimate and the historical coexist without hierarchy.

A similar gesture, though more systematic, was carried out by Miguel Secades together with the Cine Club Cubanacán in central Cuba. From the early 1980s, Miguel documented traditional celebrations and practices such as the Cruz de Mayo, regularly visiting the Fusté family to record rituals preserved across generations. He also travelled to the towns of Remedios and Camajuaní to capture the Parrandas, one of the country’s most important popular festivities.

Meanwhile, in Bejucal, Pucho provided a few metres of film to the young photographer Felipe Rouco to document the pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of San Lázaro, one of the island’s most significant syncretic religious expressions. These materials—fragmentary, incomplete, often silent or accompanied by asynchronous sound—appear as open records of time: filmic remnants in which local celebrations, religious rituals and historical events eventually acquire a universal dimension.

The screening is accompanied by live readings, recorded music performed by the Tambores de Bejucal, and a recorded interpretation of the song Babalú Ayé by Juan Barona Acosta, a playwright and amateur lyrical singer from Bejucal, activating the images as a collective experience and shared celebration. 

Pucho, Operación Tributo (Operation Tribute) – Rushes
Sorelio “Pucho” Hernández | 1983 – 1989 | 20’ | Cuba | digital | sound 

Within a single roll of film, images of the funeral held in Bejucal to honour combatants killed in the Angolan War intertwine with celebrations of Las Charangas, the town’s most important festivity. Life and mourning coexist within the same flow of images.

San Lázaro – Rushes 
Felipe Rouco | 1994 | Cuba | 27’ | digital | sound 

Record of the pilgrimage to the sanctuary of San Lázaro on December 17, 1994, during one of the deepest moments of economic and social crisis in the country.

Una tradición centenaria (A Century-Old Tradition) 
Miguel Secades | 1990 | Cuba | 13’ | digital | Spanish spoken 

Footage filmed over more than two decades by Miguel Secades and the Cine Club Cubanacán, documenting the persistence of this traditional celebration and its communal rituals in rural towns of central Cuba.

Las Parrandas Remedianas
Miguel Secades | 1983 | Cuba | 7’ | digital | sound 

Record of the construction of the plaza structures for the Parrandas of Remedios, one of the most important popular celebrations in the country, alongside the Charangas of Bejucal and the carnivals of Santiago de Cuba.

This event is available with the OCDF Bundle at Rich Mix: 6 events for £30. 

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