Nicolás Guillér Landrián is Alive and so is his Obsession for Creative Freedom

On the 20^th anniversary of his death, and 85^th of his birth, the Cuban Institute for Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) celebrates Nicolás Guillér Landrián, one of the most iconic Cuban directors of all time. This happens after years of persecution, censorship, and oblivion by the revolutionary government. Landrián’s brilliant career as a filmmaker, which ended in exile in Miami, was abruptly interrupted in 1968 when he was accused of scheming the killing of Fidel Castro. Today, his name has finally been rehabilitated thanks also to the commitment of another great contemporary Cuban director, Ernesto Daranás. After encountering some of Landrián’s decayed films in the ICAIC’s archive, Daranàs pushed for their restoration and integrated them partially into his latest release, Landrián. After its premiere at the 79^th Venice Film Festival earlier this year, this documentary was finally presented in Cuba at the 44^thedition of the New Latin American Film Festival taking place in Havana from the 8^th until the 17^th of December 2023.

Daranas’ documentary Landrián came to light after a long research process. He not only dug into the archives of the ICAIC but also collected valuable testimonies of Grettel Alfonso – Landrián’s widow – and Livio Delgado, who was Landrian’s friend and artistic partner, the DOP of his most important productions like Ociel del Toa (1965), which narrates Ociel’s life around the river Toa. Thanks to a thorough editing of very inhomogeneous material, Daranás’ documentary becomes an endearing tale for the audience. It recalls photographic fragments of Landrián’s work and wisely mixes them with memories. In the final part of the documentary, for example, Delgado looks at Landrián’s restored movies and is moved to tears, telling himself and the audience: “There he is. That’s Guillén Landrián”. Delgado is sincerely surprised to recall the beauty of those decaying images but, at the same time, also wants to acknowledge and defend the achievements of his colleagues. Which, however, even after so many years, certainly speaks for itself. Equally, moving is Grettel Alfonso’s testimony about Landrián’s character and his obsession with creative freedom. This is probably the most actual aspect of the whole movie, as discussions about freedom of speech today in Cuba are still ongoing. But Daranás seems to live the legacy of Landrián and dedicated the first national projection of his documentary to all the filmmakers affected by censorship making the top news, along with the debate about the exclusion from the festival of the movie Calls from Moscow (Llamadas desde Moscù) by Cuban director Luis Alejandro Yero. The movie narrating the life of four queer Cubans who migrated to Russia premiered at last year’s Berlinale but has not been shown in Cuba so far.

Daranás documentary also reflects Landrián’s aesthetic quests as an interpreter of the Cuban reality of that time. From the very selection of his themes: going to Baracoa and making the trilogy Ociel del Toa, Retornar a Baracoa (1966) and Reportaje (1966). Always inquiring, always questioning what “reporting” is, dialoguing with the spectator about what was happening in that boiling Cuba. En un barrio viejo (1963) e Los del baile (1965) both short films reflect that ethic of approaching the common people, “his race”, as he once told Livio Delgado, from a kind of affectionate and bidirectional dialogue with the people who nourished his work. Daranás, with his documentary, manages to show us the beauty of Landrián’s universe, not only in Landrian’s drawings shown by Alfonso, but also in the faces Landrián captured in his movies: that of a black man from Havana’s neighborhoods, or that of a beautiful young woman from Baracoa. Both tell perhaps more about the origins of Cuba than the place itself. And last, the landscape of the Toa river, which Ociel traveled in his boat, and which, for Daranás is a special place, since it’s where his father went to alphabetize a family during the literacy campaign of 1967.

This documentary on the life and work of Landrián, is in a direct dialogue with a certain metaphorical search of Ociel, who in a boat crosses a golden river at sunset, which is the Toa but could also be Hades, taking up the theme of death. And when Daranás turns Livio and Ociel into spectators of Landrián, several decades later, at times it feels to the spectator as if they were meeting again. And then, our eyes discover, through the screen, the marvelous mystery that “the end is not the end”, and Landrián is still alive in his cinema. “Have you seen death?” and Ociel answers that he has never, that death cannot be seen, touched, or heard. Landrián is alive, at least in this 44^th edition of the Latin American Film Festival. It is evident in the eagerness of today’s filmmakers from all over the world to pay tribute to the one who set the bar of cinema so high. It is a very explicit tribute, those of Tommaso Santambrogio in his melancholic The Oceans are the Real Continents (Los Oceanos son los Verdadores Continents), where two of his characters imagine watching Ociel del Toa in an abandoned theatre. While it is more implicit in the documentary Cine Libre by Adolfo Conti and Elia Romanelli. There the power of Cuban posters, recently declared world heritage by UNESCO, are enlightened, and often Landrian’s are once featured when reworking the history of Cuban cinema from the revolution until today. A revolution that in Cuba has been political but also aesthetic and poetic, as Landriàn reminds us.

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