“The Padilla Affair” nominated for Best Documentary at the CEC Awards – Repeating Islands
Escribiendocine reports that El caso Padilla [The Padilla Affair, 2022]—directed by Cuban film director based in Spain, Pavel Giroud—has been nominated for the prestigious Spanish Film Writers’ Circle [Círculo de Escritores Cinematográficos de España (CEC)] awards, in the category of Best Documentary Feature Film.
Other films nominated in this category are: Hay una puerta ahí, directed by Facundo Ponce de León and Juan Ponce de León (Uruguay); Juan Mariné, un siglo de cine, María Luisa Pujol (Spain); La vida de Brianeitor, Álvaro Longoria (Spain); and Libres: Duc in altum, Santos Blanco.
According to Escribiendocine, the film Cerrar los ojos [To Close One’s Eyes], by Spanish director Víctor Erice, has emerged as the undisputed leader on the list of feature films, with a total of 12 nominations. Along with Víctor Erice, other Spanish filmmakers contending for Best Director are J.A. Bayona (La sociedad de la nieve), David Trueba (Saben aquell), and Pablo Berger (Robot Dreams).
Contenders for Best Foreign Film are Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan (United States); Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese (United States); Past Lives, Celine Song (United States); Kuolleet lehdet [Fallen Leaves], Aki Kaurismäki (Finland); and Anatomie d’une chute [Anatomy of a Fall], Justine Triet (France).
The award ceremony will take place on February 5 in Madrid.
Description of El caso Padilla (from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University):
Spring 1971, Havana: The poet Heberto Padilla is released from jail and appears at a meeting of the Cuban writers’ guild where he spouts, in his own words, a “heartfelt self-criticism.” He proceeds to self-incriminate, declaring his status as a counterrevolutionary agent and accusing many of his attending colleagues, including his wife, of the same crime. A month before, his arrest under the accusation of attacking the security of the Cuban state, mobilized the intellectual vanguard of the entire world, who addressed a letter to Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution, with whom they previously sympathized, demanding freedom for the poet, whose only sin was to dissent and criticize through his poetic work. The writer’s filmed mea culpa, shown to the public for the first time, marks the narrative line of a story, punctuated by interventions from Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Edwards, Carlos Fuentes, and Fidel Castro.
Spanish-Cuban filmmaker Pavel Giroud’s feature El caso Padilla (The Padilla Affair) may well be the most original documentary of the year precisely because of what it does not do: tinker with the archive. Similarly focused on tracing history, it avoids accumulation or pastiche in favor of a dedication to one singular relic: a box of Betamax reels whose provenance—out of history and out of Cuba—Giroud declines to reveal.
The “Padilla affair” was a notorious case of ideological warfare that riveted Cuba and the world in 1971. Cuba’s internationally renowned poet Heberto Juan Padilla was jailed and once released, publicly renounced his own writing as a betrayal of the Cuban Revolution. Giroud’s box had recordings of that signal speech in its entirety; transferred, edited down, and restored to luminous black-and-white, they yield a riveting record of political consequences. Giroud’s distillation captures Padilla’s act of self-demolition, performed in front of comrades who sit transfixed in a crowded room, waiting for his punitive gaze to rest on each of them in turn as he delivers his and their own condemnation—including, shockingly, of his own wife. In this cross between a Stalinist show trial and a homegrown Soy Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964), Giroud has sculpted the found footage into an explosive time capsule, maintaining the purity of the record to remind viewers of what’s at stake for intellectual freedom.
For full article, see https://www.escribiendocine.com/noticias/2023/12/29/16835-todos-los-nominados-del-circulo-de-escritores-cinematograficos-de-espana
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