By Raúl Menchaca
HAVANA, Jan. 20 (Xinhua) — A group of young Cuban film lovers are promoting an open-air film exhibition project in Havana that has been very well received by the community.
Neighbors gather every Saturday night, in the parking lot of the La Puntilla store, to enjoy free children’s films of various nationalities, in a unique defense of a medium whose collective enjoyment is threatened by new technologies.
The “El Parqueo” project has gradually acquired a community character, although in its beginnings, several months ago, it was conceived as a space to entertain children during school holidays.
“The project arose in March 2023, at a time when there were vacations and the neighborhood children were playing and we thought that a good idea could be to show them not only international cinema, but we started with Cuban cinema,” the young man explained to Xinhua. Liam Gómez, one of the founders of the project.
Gómez, who is a professor at the Higher Institute of Industrial Design, stated that the idea was born from the young Ixchel Casado, a graduate of the Faculty of Media Art, who brought together a dozen friends who graduated from specialties related to art and the communication.
“The community has received it in a spectacular way and more and more people are coming from the different municipalities of Havana to see the screenings,” said the young man.
The films are projected on the wall of a residential building from the projector of one of the organizers and using the electrical outlet of a neighbor’s house and the speaker of another.
The Caribbean winter did not at all prevent some 200 people of all ages from coming to the place this Saturday to share the screening of the American animated film “The Lion King”, a work that alludes to values common to any family.
Neighbors bring their chairs and even sofas, but walls, stones or simply the floor also serve as seats for the unique open-air cinema, located just a few meters from the coast.
The success of the project can be seen in the fact that it has surpassed the margins of the community and now entire families come from municipalities further away from the Cuban capital.
“We come from Cerro, a municipality that is a little far from this place, but whenever we can we do it to enjoy movies together that are part of our childhood,” said twenty-year-old Alissa Cagigas, who was accompanied by her friends Solange Soler and Dariana Valdés.
Sitting on a sheet, the three girls claimed to be regulars at these outdoor screenings, whose billboard is displayed on social networks with the slogan “bring a chair and a friend.”
“El Parqueo” is heir to an old tradition of mobile cinema started in the early 1960s by the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) as an alternative to bring cinema closer to the most intricate communities in the country.
That unique cultural effort, which used a projector installed on a truck, is captured in the award-winning documentary “For the First Time,” made in 1967 by Cuban filmmaker Octavio Cortázar, which shows the impressions and opinions of peasants who were watching movies for the first time. time.
“We have made a couple of presentations outside the parking lot, but we aspire to expand in a more systematic way to recover that tradition of Cuban cinematography that was mobile cinema,” said Gómez.
The young design professor pointed out that “El Parqueo” also aims to resume the tradition of Cuban film posters with the creation of new works to advertise films on social networks. End
2024-01-21 04:07:57
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