Latin American Film Festival: "El Caso Padilla" (2022, Cuba & Spain)

Description

The 2024 Latin American Film Festival continues with El Caso Padilla (The Padilla Affair), a 2022 film from Cuba and Spain. The film is in Spanish with English subtitles.

In the spring of 1971 in Havana, poet Heberto Padilla is released from prison and attends a Cuban writers' guild meeting. During the gathering, he delivers what he describes as a "heartfelt self-criticism," admitting to being a counterrevolutionary agent and accusing many colleagues, including his wife, of the same offense. Just a month earlier, Padilla's arrest on charges of endangering the security of the Cuban state had sparked a global response from the intellectual community. Supporters, who had previously sympathized with Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution, wrote a letter demanding the poet's freedom. Padilla's only "sin" was expressing dissent and criticism through his poetry. The Padilla Affair, punctuated by interventions from Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Edwards, Carlos Fuentes, and Fidel Castro, stands as an astonishing documentary. It provides a window into exploring facets of Cuba's history that continue to resonate in the present.

The 2024 Latin American Film Festival is hosted by the Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies and co-sponsored by the Aronson Center for International Studies, the Center for Advanced Media Studies, and the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.