Hate and art have never been linked.
It happened to Andy García and Guillermo Cabrera Infante and that hoax that was called The lost city (2005), evacuated by international critics.
Here is a sample of what was said about that film at the time, in this case from the Spanish critic Beatriz Maldivia: «The film is, in short, a series of endless dialogues, poorly written, with no connections between them and without much purpose that Andy García and Cabrera Infante perpetuate a kind of essay about Cuba that would have been rejected in any children’s newsletter. It is cinematic – not just ideological – null.
After a wide publicity in the preparation stage and the announcement that it will be the most expensive film prepared by the Cuban exile (read counterrevolution), it was released in Miami Planted, Directed by Lilo Vilaplana and written by Ángel Santiesteban, Juan Manuel Cao and the director himself.
Theme: recreate, from fiction, “the gallantry and resistance of Cuban political prisoners in the 60s and 70s in the face of the atrocities of the Castro-Communist prison regime.”
In 24 hours, the film was posted on social media, something unusual for a premiere and expensive film, which should continue to be shown at festivals around the world to try to sell itself and raise funds, so how unsuccessfully tried The lost city, rejected here and there as infamous.
Someone in the networks found this detachment to release the film strange without recovering a penny and commented: “But why do they do it and do not try to obtain economic benefits from it?”
There are two obvious purposes in this hasty roll of the dice: first, to join the subversive campaign against Cuba, to present a propagandistic and one-dimensional image of the subject it deals with, without referring to the causes – not a few of the criminals – that led those men to prison and, secondly, the vain dream of the filmmakers to believe that they had billed a great work, able to respond – as they said – to what was exposed in The wasp network (Olivier Assayas, 2019), a film that outraged them for presenting true heroes opposed to the empire’s orders, the exact opposite of “heroes” who are now trying to revive the past as a “message of rebellion” to generations who did not live in those days.
The trick of rewriting history and leaving what is not right in the dump is old: the United States lost the Vietnam War, but years later it had Rambo, able to win another vengeful invasion on his own and thus comfort the nostalgic.
The counter-revolution has lost, for more than 60 years, its intentions to recover through blood and fire and maneuvers of all kinds, and now it uses the well-known jack of all trades offered by the fiction of a film to sentimentally reassemble handy facts. your convenience.
Already in the artistic field – and professional critics will realize, if you pay attention – PLANTING allows us to appreciate the negative consequences of a terrible melodrama that confuses narrative times, divides the protagonists into good, very good and bloody bad, with verbal dialogues seeking effectiveness with each expression, a repetitive scenario full of common ground to the point of exhaustion, music curious and scenes of beatings and murders in prisons and labor camps that cover much of the two hours of filming; Thick lines of achievement marked by the tearful heights of conflict and little work embodying a contemporary act of revenge, which is due in large part to the worst Hollywood, despite the fact that the film had a millionaire budget.
Some lucid minds at the Miami Film Festival, where the film was released a few days ago, must have realized that PLANTING It was a mess and, although they accepted it, they didn’t give it – according to director Lilo Vilaplana – the importance that the film deserves.
Vilaplana wrote on his Facebook account that the Festival gave the film “a fifth-grade treatment”, that it did not support it “neither in advertising nor in anything; it’s a film made in exile, with artists from here, it should have given it another importance ».
And outraged – and perhaps suspecting the artistic failure so painful for any creator – he raised the political parade: “Failure to respect the Miami Film Festival in historical exile and its complicity with the Castro dictatorship is an ignominy.”
And so that there is no doubt about the intentions of the film, he wrote that the Festival organization does not like films like PLANTINGThey like “those who build bridges, who say they must unite, but there are no negotiations with the dictatorship.”
He also concluded: “Those films that invite you to go to Cuba are complicit in the dictatorship, and that regime must be removed, because it has done a lot of damage to Cubans … They (the directors of the Festival) did not want the film to be, And I really felt it at the people who participated in the Festival, they were upset that this film was there ».
The film will find its audience in a fervent sector of exile and will not miss those who promote it as a “revealing work”, without giving credit to the manipulation of the emotions it displays, as a basic principle of counter-revolutionary propaganda subject to a subversive plan. .who does not rest.
But hatred and art were never linked. Good luck with art for the next director, and goodbye.