Known for his cinema combining fiction and documentary, the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami organized in 2016 a short film workshop at the audiovisual school of San Antonio de los Banos in Cuba. It was there that he advised the Argentine director Pablo Briones and his Pezcal, a short film about a meeting with two children from the Cuban countryside, Leonel Aguilera and Antuàn Alemàn. Two years later, the Argentinian from Geneva, helped by the Nashvillian duo The Moving Pictures Boys, dedicated his first feature film, Baracoa, to them.
Journey to the heart of childhood
At the dawn of docufiction and direct cinema, Pablo Briones signs a sensitive and intense immersion in the heart of the daily life of two Cuban boys. Not concerned with the boundary between reality and fiction, Baracoa amazes us in his sincerity and his way of capturing a very current childhood. In an instant, the two very young actors rise to a level of authenticity and naturalness rarely seen in cinema reminiscent of Italian neorealism . It is in parallel that a hybrid cinema is brought to us, witness of a Cuban society in full upheaval and a loss of identity references. In this, Baracoa is a true receiver of this childhood, appropriating Cuba and its ruins as a great playground. Between precipices and sweet moments of life of impressive spontaneity, helped by the know-how of The Moving Picture Boys, the filmmaker manages the feat of immortalizing rare snapshots in today's cinema. However, and this is where the limit of the director's first film lies, Baracoa is also a portrait of Cuba and sometimes struggles to really grasp its essence.
Direct cinema in the bowels of a country in transition
It would be difficult to ignore certain sequences exploring with finesse the birth of sensitivity and temperament in adolescents parallel linked to the rebirth of Cuba. We could mention this exploration of the caves, the highlight and probably the most beautiful scene of the film, marrying with a certain virtuosity the themes of Baracoa. Like an exploration of the bowels of Cuban reality seen through the eyes of children at the crossroads of their respective destinies, one of them leaving for Havana to settle there. The filmmaker touches a certain delicacy that he will find difficult to grasp later. However, we will detect a sincere desire to give the two teenagers a real evolution in half-fiction, through a narrative trajectory just as hybrid between improvised reflections and agreed statements. With an ode to friendship intrinsically linked to solitude and brutal adaptation to the vastness of the capital, Baracoa will choose an agreed structure. Indeed, Pablo Briones prefers to seize Havana as a mirror, often contemplative, of the evils of these young actors. Moving away from a sociological look, although some elements are still in the background, Pablo Briones will finally let himself be carried away by fiction in the last quarter of his film. A rather artificial bias that does not prevent us from saluting the undeniable accuracy of a hybrid and surprising footage.
