Low-Budget Film Festival: The Place for the First Time
Many producers premiere their first work, make their debut in competition and experience the premier of their work, in Gibara.
Yanelis Abreu *
The International Low-Budget Film Festival is for many producers and screenwriters the place to make a debut in competitions.
To premier in Gibara one has to cross the tough selection of the examination committee from among a thousand works. To experience the premier of the first work in Gibara for sure one will never forget it. To experience along with the public the premier of the latest material is usually an event for anyone.
These and others are the possibilities that the competition offers, its commitment to alternative cinema becomes for participants a ticket for continuous moments of excitement, an adrenalin burst during screenings and a deep pride...
Within the most recent Cuban documentary panorama is appreciated the persistence of many titles that tackle social and economic problems of present-day Cuba. "Raza", the documentary by Eric M. Corvalán, gets back to the prickly subject of racial discrimination, a question that demands to be discussed as soon as possible without taboos and reservations.
Eric is a producer for television and competes for the first time with this first work. In half an hour the alternation of shots in color and in black and white confirm the objective of its author: “I am trying to represent the racial problem of Cuban society that has a high mixed race group, from three different and contradictory interpretations: the scientific, in the mouth of researchers, the official, in the voices of the officials and the popular.”
About the emergence of the idea he comments: “This theme has been little tackled in the media, and I see various expressions of racism; things that some recognize and others don’t, because they’ve become unconscious acts. I want to arouse interest in the theme and the spread of these malicious stereotypes that affect our culture and our identity.”
Gibara shows in the mouths of its protagonists that it is not a small Festival. It is the place selected for many producers to premier their first work, for some to make their debut in competition, increasing the spectrum of subject matter in audiovisuals, and to experience, with intensity, the premier of a work.
*Cubanow special correspondent at the Low-Budget Film Festival
*Translated by Susana Hurlich
