For over a decade now, the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) no longer completely administers the fate of Cuban film. Practically overnight, with the arrival in Cuba of digital technology, small groups of independent producers began to emerge. Made up mostly of young graduates of the Higher Art Institute’s (ISA) Faculty of Audiovisual Communication Media and its provincial affiliates (some of them with subsequent training at the International School of Film and Television), these groups without resources or legal backing, working in do-it-yourself conditions, began to produce small audiovisual pieces. They began improvising creative ways of doing things without the industry’s control, and to make fresh, irreverent films of the dark corners of Cuban reality. Viewing them with reciprocal hostility, the ICAIC mistrustfully saw the birth of the independents, while the latter blamed the industry for the critical state of cinematographic production in Cuba. What distinguishes the independents is identifiable above all in their informal, more flexible strategies for production, in their search for more effective mechanisms of distribution and consumption, and in their selection of uncomfortable, delicate themes that question reality. Independent film emerged, not as an individual pastime, but as an alternative channel for production,...

From November 29 through December 2 the Flavors of Mexico and Cuba Gourmet Festival will be held in Old Havana: Investigation from the Audio-visual perspective,  Literature and   Tourism, a cultural project directed by Alicia García and Maria Eugenia del Rio, that is born with the goal of studying in depth the patrimonial values of the culinary art and to explore its presence and influence in the audio-visual world,   literature,   plastic arts,  music and tourism, among other artistic and identity manifestations of Cuba and Mexico.