The 15th Minnesota Cuban Film Festival (MCFF) features films that address the achievements and challenges of the Cuban people through the eyes of its filmmakers. The festival highlights diverse and challenging films of social change, human struggle and the boldness of the human spirit.

All films presented with English subtitles.

Schedule of Events:

February 28, 2024:

7:00 PM: The Black Box (La Caja Negra)

Director: Enrique "Kiki" Alvarez | Fiction | Cuba | 2021 | 93 min

Cuban filmmaker Enrique "Kiki" Alvarez's newest feature paints a slow-burning love story set in the years immediately following the Cuban Revolution in January of 1959. The Black Box is a secret diary written by Elsa and read by her granddaughter several decades later, a film about a young woman who finds and reads the experiential, emotional and political legacy that her grandmother has left hidden like a magical object. Featuring rare footage from the beginning of the Cuban Revolution.

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March 7, 2024:

7:00 PM: The World Of Nelsito (El Mundo De Nelsito)

Directors: Fernando Perez, Asistents: Melba Nuñez, Mario Orlando Muñiz | Fiction | Cuba, Spain | 2022 | 100 min

This film revolves around a young man of humble origins who has an unnamed disability. He lives with his mother, a divorced artist whose paintings aren’t selling. The youth's strange affliction is never spoken of, but he always appears lying down and never speaks. At one moment, he sees that the door has been left open, and takes advantage of it to go out on the street, where he suffers an accident. That trip outside is a kind of liberation for him, since it opens a secret door which he alone has access to. He begins to spin tales in which his neighbors participate, but with other lives.

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March 14, 2024:

7:00 PM: Castro's Spies

Directors: Ollie Aslin, Gary Lennon | Documentary | Cuba | 2020 | 103 min

This film is a thrilling true story of an elite group of Cuban spies sent undercover to the US in the 1990s. From their recruitment, training and eventual capture on US soil; this film peers into a secret world of false identities, love affairs and betrayal. Using never seen before footage from the Cuban Film Institute's archive and first-hand testimony from the people at the heart of this story, Castro's Spies gives a rare glimpse into the shadowy world of a spy -- where the stakes are life and death.

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March 21, 2024:

7:00 PM: Viva

Director: Paddy Breathnach | Fiction | Cuba, Ireland | 2015 | 100 min

This is an Irish movie set in Havana, where it was filmed with a keen eye to that city’s dinginess in tropical light. Its hero, Jesus (Héctor Medina), is a gay hairdresser who dreams of becoming a drag entertainer at the nightclub where he coifs the noisy, squabbling divas. Jesus, whose mother is dead and whose father abandoned him, lives in a slum, and is watched over by the club’s tough but caring star, an aging drag queen known as Mama. Complicating Jesus’s precarious existence is the sudden reappearance of his father, Angel, a former boxer released from prison who likes his rum and is rumored to have killed a man. Angel’s initial reaction to his son’s homosexuality and fondness for drag is all too predictable: Viva doesn’t amplify Angel’s hostility to tell a prolonged tale of persecution and liberation.

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March 28, 2024:

7:00 PM: Sisters of the Heart (Hermanas Del Corazon)

Director: Gloria Rolando | Documentary | Cuba | 2023 | 115 min

This documentary covers the origins of the Oblate Sisters of Providence and it is dedicated to the work of the Oblates in Cuba. Viewers can have information about the events that were triggered by the Haitian Revolution at the end of the 18th century: A large wave of French emigrants, mulattoes, free and enslaved blacks occurred. But free blacks and mulattoes also represent a very important social and cultural nucleus. In this context, the family of Elizabeth Clarisse Lange appears, who in the future would be Mother Mary Lange, founder of the Oblate Sisters of La Providencia in 1829. Religious education – Catholic – was accompanied by a requirement for preparation to face a society full of discrimination based on skin color. From the beginning, the education of black girls and boys was its main mission. And both in the United States and in Cuba (1900-1961) they faced a racist and classist society. Religious, former students of the schools that the Oblates opened in Cuba and above all the investigation, the search for a time and a style of education through the family memory of Gloria Rolando, the film’s director, together with the testimonies of the last Cuban Oblates, are the voices and narrative ingredients of the Sisters of the Heart project.

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April 4, 2024:

7:00 PM: Habana Blues

Director: Benito Zambrano | Fiction | Cuba, Spain | 2005 | 110 min

This is a Spanish and Cuban film by director Benito Zambrano which tells the story of two young musicians in Cuba. The two musicians, Ruy and Tito, whose music is a mix of traditional Cuban music and more modern music such as rap, get a chance at an international breakthrough through a Spanish record company, but they would have to change their Cuba-themed lyrics to cater to an international audience. Ruy considers this a betrayal of his country and his art, whereas Tito recognizes the financial necessity of it. Art versus commerce, nationalism versus globalism, and communism versus capitalism are some of the themes of the film.

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Dates: February 28, 2024 - April 4, 2024

Location:

The Main Cinema,
115 SE Main Street,
Minneapolis, MN 55414.

Ticket Prices:

General Admission: $10.00
Member Admission: $8.00
Student Admission: $7.00

Click here for more information.