Gibara Film Festival and its historical – foundational look   

The 18th Gibara International Film Festival (FICGibara),  which will be held from August 6 to 10 in this town in the province of Holguin town, will take a strong, historical and foundational look inspired by the Low Budget Film Manifesto, linking the community with the seventh art and its economic-social development.

Sergio Benvenuto Solás, director of FICGibara, said in an exclusive interview with Cuban News Agency that under the slogan of this edition, Filma el Oriente! (Eastern Cuba Filming), the aim is to have an impact on audiovisual growth and on local progress in order to make other related projects visible in the search for a sustainable future.

Benvenuto Solás referred to the need to support filmmakers with their works, and to this end, the Low Budget Film Factory will be implemented for the first time, with the goal of promoting low-budget film initiatives created in the five eastern Cuban provinces and in Camagüey.

The Cine en Construcción (Films in Progress) program for Cuban and foreign filmmakers will also be resumed, which will reward projects with post-production services and possible distribution of the films.

The Festival’s director recently stressed at a press conference that the visuals were devised by Cuban designer Nelson Ponce, the creator of colors and graphic look adopted by the event since the very start.

Humberto Solás (1941-2008), famed Cuban filmmaker and founder of FICGibara, refers in the Manifiesto del Cine Pobre (Low Budget Film Manifesto) that this modality does not allude to a cinema lacking in ideas or artistic quality, but rather of restricted economy, executed both in in less developed or peripheral countries, as well as in the heart of the governing and in the heart of the leading societies at the economic-cultural level.

The 28th edition of the International Film Festival of Gibara will begin with the screening of the fiction feature film “Sin Papeles” (2023), by the Chilean producer Christian de la Cortina.

After receiving around 900 entries, the Selection Committee chose a total of 83 films, mostly from Cuba, Brazil, Spain and Argentina, for the official competition for the first time for the official competition for the Lucía Awards.

In commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the Cuban Film Institute, the – the event’s highest award; Lucía Award of Honor, will be given to filmmakers Manuel Herrera (1942), Manuel Pérez Paredes (1939), and the director of photography Livio Delgado (1938).

With information from Cuban News Agency / Translated by Radio Angulo