Cuban Amateur Films Rescued from the Trash
The Bilbao Festival pays tribute to the irreverent Cuban creator Manuel Marzel.
HAVANA TIMES – One afternoon in 2020, filmmakers Lucíi Malandro and Daniel Saucedo were walking through the streets of Central Havana when they happened to come across a trash container that held five 16mm film reels. It was an unexpected discovery, but not an isolated one: in recent years, numerous fragments of Cuba’s audiovisual memory have ended up tossed out, scattered, or abandoned, with no system in place to guarantee their preservation.
That chance encounter marked the birth of one of the most important non-institutional Cuban film archives in the country: Los Subterráneos. Today, this archive safeguards an essential part of the independent and amateur cinema produced on the Island. Many of the films made at Havana’s legendary Sigma film club are preserved there, including several by Manuel Marzel, who passed away this past July at age 57 and was one of the most original voices in Cuban experimental cinema.
Films such as A Norman McLaren (1990), Evidentemente comieron chocolate suizo (último rollo) (1991), and La ballena es buena (1991) are among the works preserved, exhibited, and promoted by the archive and by the collective that manages it, Wild Archivists. Thanks to them, it was precisely this Thursday that the Bilbao International Festival of Documentary and Short Film (Zinebi) paid tribute to the Cuban filmmaker Manuel Marzel.
Marzel built in his films a playful, irreverent, and free universe, guided by intuition and a creative impulse that defied any canon. While much of Cuban cinema at the time followed more conventional paths, he worked with humor, absurdity, and formal games that made him a cult figure for later generations.
The archive created by Malandro and Saucedo is not an isolated case. In recent times, several initiatives have emerged in Cuba dedicated to preserving an unofficial memory that would otherwise be irretrievably lost. Archivos del Monte, for example, is an initiative created by researchers and artists Hanzer Gonzalez Garriga and Jorge Luis Roig Garcia, dedicated to rescuing and preserving domestic photographs, family albums, negatives, slides, and other private visual materials that have been left ownerless or risk being lost.
On the archive’s website there is a clear invitation for those who emigrate: to temporarily deposit their family photos and home videos to ensure their preservation, with the promise that they can be retrieved at any time when the family decides. In a reality in which houses in Cuba are sold “with everything inside” in order to emigrate, and where memory is discarded in the trash because there is no state system to safeguard it, initiatives like these become essential. They prevent the disappearance of an intimate heritage that, once lost, is irrecoverable.
Collectives like Wild Archivists and Archivos del Monte work from intuition, from urgency, and from the inherent fragility of the domestic archive, but the impact of their work is enormous. These are projects that, quietly, are reassembling fragments of Cuba’s visual history from the margins and from everyday life, ensuring that those lives, gestures, and images that were never considered “important” are not lost forever.
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.