Leslie Sardinias was born in Cuba, but he has developed his work fundamentally outside the island, first in Spain, where he lived for several years, and now in New York. Once you approach his work for the first time you see a poetic visualization and a well-argued discourse behind each one of his perspectives. I have revised with attention your most recent project (Cocoon), which connects you to your roots through nature. Why? What is the link? The plants and the process of creation, how are they related? I believe any connection with the first memories begins by discovering where you belong and to (re)discover who you are you have to get to the root, to a genuine root without traces of humanity and, therefore, without what is toxic about customs, politics and ways of living, with which, in my case, I who have lived outside of my place of origin – Cuba -, and after I returned many years later, I felt out of focus with that reality and the way I found, without chauvinisms and errant politics, was to seek the nature that formed us, so I based my work in the expedition of Alexander von Humboldt to...

Cuba-U.S. relations have a real anchorage in cinema. This is because perhaps the seventh art is, today, the most diverse, complex and multicultural expression of the island or because, in spite of everything, films continue to be made and a cinema that is, in the midst of all types of difficulties, honest and with a high aesthetic quality, and because perhaps, also, there’s a history that endorses and sustains one of the most important cinematographies of Latin America. In that interest, and from that perspective, there is Bach Media, a production company founded by Jesús Hernández, a graduate from the Faculty of Audiovisual Means of the University of the Arts of Cuba, currently established in New York. A very important exchange, which is already showing results, is being promoted with Bach Media, and it will have a fundamental point of visibility in the Hispanic Film Festival of Stony Brook University. The contemporary Cuban films that will be at the center of the contest are: El acompañante, by Pavel Giroud; La pared de las palabras, by Fernando Pérez; Conducta, by Ernesto Daranas, and Esteban, by Jonal Cosculluela. They all show dissimilar faces of the island and the event confirms the possibility...