Looking Back at: "Looking for Havana"

November 15, 2024 - 6:00 pm

Segal Theatre
The Graduate Center, CUNY

A Screening & Conversation with Cuban Filmmaker Alina Rodríguez Abreu

In 2007, as the culmination of her senior thesis at Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) Cuban filmmaker Alina Rodríguez Abreu premiered the 25-minute documentary “Buscándote Havana” (Looking for Havana). The film tells the story of provincial migrants to Havana who live a precarious, “illegal” existence in the city’s slums, cut off from state support due to their marginal, undocumented status as city residents. Given the film’s focus on the twin themes of marginality and clandestinity, it was both censored and awarded prizes when it premiered.

One person who managed to see it before it was pulled from Cuban theaters was the late American historian, Elizabeth Dore. Impressed with bravery of the story it told, Dore immediately reached out to Rodríguez Abreu including her as a subject in “Memories of the Cuban Revolution,” the pioneering oral history project she was then undertaking in Cuba. Dore also selected the filmmaker’s story as one of seven (of 124) life histories she included in her 2023 book, How Things Fall Apart: What Happened to the Cuban Revolution (Duke University Press).

This panel discussion, the second in the three-part series “Hearing Cuban Voices in a Time of Crisis,” will begin with a screening of “Buscándote Havana” followed by a pair of guided conversations with the filmmaker. First, Rodríguez Abreu will talk with the Latin American cinephile and CCNY Media and Communication Arts Professor Jerry Carlson about her struggles making the film in the face of police intervention and state censorship. Then, she will talk with Cuban writer Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo about entrusting her story to Elizabeth Dore and having it preserved for posterity both in Dore’s book and as part of the “Cuban Voices” archive at Columbia University.

Alina Rodríguez Abreu was born in Havana in 1984 and grew up in San Miguel del Padrón on the outskirts of the capital. Though attracted to the arts from an early age, she attended Cuba’s Lenin High School, renown as the country’s best college preparatory science academy. Later she studied filmmaking at Cuba’s Advanced Institute of Art (ISA). With financial backing from the Spanish Embassy in Cuba, she was able to complete her final thesis documentary “Buscándote Havana” (Looking for Havana) and graduate in 2007. The film earned her top honors (Título de Oro) and various prizes but also garnered her the suspicion and censorship of the government’s cultural commissars. Rodriguez Abreu emigrated to Mexico in 2011 where she worked in television and film as an assistant director until becoming a producer for Blindspot, allowing her to work on various Discovery Channel and National Geographic documentaries. In 2013, she moved to Miami where she worked as a producer for Univisión, Telemundo, Endemol Shine Boomdog, and Bravo. In 2019, she was the producer of the feature film “El ultimo balsero,” which premiered at the Miami Film Festival just prior to the onset of the pandemic. Finally, in 2020 she was hired by Netflix as a member of its Local Language Originals team. In 2022, she returned to Mexico to support production of original content for Netflix from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Chile.

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo (Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis) is a writer and photographer from Havana, Cuba. In exile, Hypermedia Publishing has released several of his works, including his collections of chronicles, Del clarín escuchad el silencio (2016) and Uber Cuba (2021). He is also the author of a short story collection, Boring Home (2014 – previously censored in Cuba), an anthology of Cuban narrative, and a photo book. His work has appeared in publications such as Smithsonian Magazine, In These Times, Sampsonia Way, Human Geography, and Words Without Borders, as well as websites like El Nacional (Venezuela), Qué Pasa (Chile), Diario de Cuba, and others. His first novel, New Jersey Disappears, is forthcoming.

Ted A. Henken (Ph.D., Tulane University) is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch College, CUNY. He has conducted sociological research in Cuba and interviewed numerous Cubans over the past 25 years. Based on this extensive research, he has published several books, articles, and profiles, including Cuba’s Digital Revolution: Citizen Innovation and State Policy (2021, co-edited with Sara García Santamaría) and Entrepreneurial Cuba: The Changing Policy Landscape (2015, co-authored with Archibald Ritter). He is currently working on an oral history of Cuban independent journalism, tentatively titled Saturn’s Children: The 60-Year Struggle to Reestablish a Free Press in Cuba (under contract with the University of Florida Press).

Jerry W. Carlson (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is professor and a historian of narrative forms with special expertise in narrative theory, the history of the novel, global independent film, and the cinemas of the Americas. From 2013 to 2022 he served as Chair of the Department of Media & Communication Arts at The City College CUNY. In addition, at the CUNY Graduate Center he is a member of the doctoral faculties of French, Comparative Literature, and Film & Media Cultures and a Senior Fellow at the Bildner Center for Western Hemispheric Studies. He has lectured at Stanford, Columbia, Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV (Cuba), the University of Paris, and the University of Sao Paulo, among others. His current research is focused on how film and prose fiction from the Global South portray the histories and legacies of slavery, imperialism and colonialism. Moreover, he is an active producer, director, and writer with multiple Emmy Awards. As a Senior Producer for City University Television (CUNY-TV), he created the series City Cinematheque about film history, Canapé about French-American cultural relations, and Nueva York (in Spanish) about the Latino cultures of New York City. As an independent producer, his work includes the Showtime Networks production Dirt directed by Nancy Savoca and Looking for Palladin directed by Andrzej Krakowski. In 1998, he was inducted by France as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques.

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