News
EL CASO PADILLA. DIRECTOR: PAVEL GIROUD
Media:
Spring 1971, Havana: The poet Heberto Padilla is released from jail and appears at a meeting of the Cuban writers' guild where he spouts, in his own words, a "heartfelt self-criticism." He proceeds to self-incriminate, declaring his status as a counterrevolutionary agent and accusing many of his attending colleagues, including his wife, of the same crime. A month before, his arrest under the accusation of attacking the security of the Cuban state, mobilized the intellectual vanguard of the entire world, who addressed a letter to Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution, with whom they previously sympathized, demanding freedom for the poet, whose only sin was to dissent and criticize through his poetic work. The writer's filmed mea culpa, shown to the public for the first time, marks the narrative line of a story, punctuated by interventions from Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Edwards, Carlos Fuentes and Fidel Castro. The Padilla case is an astonishing documentary that opens a window to explore aspects of Cuba's past that reverberate in its present, such as the lack of freedom of expression and the struggles of the cultural collective to obtain it.
El Caso Padilla (2022) - Plot - IMDb
Premiere in Spain 2/6/2023
Di la verdad.
Di, al menos, tu verdad.
Y después
deja que cualquier cosa ocurra:
que te rompan la página querida,
que te tumben a pedradas la puerta,
que la gente
se amontone delante de tu cuerpo
como si fueras
un prodigio o un muerto.
Poética
Heberto Padilla (Cuba, 1932 - USA, 2000).