2024-04-30 15:30:00
Photo: Twitter
Text: Fede Gayardo
The director of the documentary “La Habana de Fito”, Juan Pin Vilar, spoke with Rolling Stone magazine about the screening of his film in Argentina.
The material, which has as its axis a conversation that Pin Villar and Fito Páez had in 2017, was part of the programming of the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival (BAFICI) concluded this April 28.
Furthermore, from that date on, the film will be shown on the screens of the Cinépolis chain in the Argentine capital.
The text of the aforementioned magazine comments on the link of the River Plate musician with Cuba, which began in 1987 when he arrived on the island for the first time to sing at the Varadero Festival.
“Fito was devastated: a few months before his aunts had been murdered in Rosario. And that trip to Cuba, facilitated by Pablo Milanés, was like a hug. Since then, he merged into an idyll with the Cuban people, with his colleagues, the musicians and other members of the artistic ecosystem. Among them, the filmmaker Juan Pin Villar,” adds Rolling Stone.
Regarding the idea of the audiovisual, Juan Pin said that “it was a conversation we had three years before starting to make the film, in 2017. Initially, I just wanted to archive it for my grandchildren. But during the pandemic, producer Ricardo Figueredo proposed that I apply for a fund and finish it.”
As the article explains, “Fito’s Havana” was initially censored in Cuba, in April 2024 and then “was shown (incomplete) on television in that country, without authorization from its filmmakers.”
In this regard, the Cuban director insisted that “the political is one of the different perspectives that surround the documentary. Luckily, it is not the only one, we live in an absolutely different world from that one.”
Then, he added that “without a doubt, the censorship, theft and subsequent illegal exhibition of the documentary generated an extra-border debate within the union that led to the founding of the Assembly of Cuban Filmmakers; one of the vanguards of creative thought that tries to change the country. Without a doubt, initially, all this empowered us, but our documentary stands up for itself when you see it. You just have to let it sail.”
Later, Pin Vilar mentioned his meeting with Páez, which although it was facilitated by the troubadour Santiago Feliú, the turning point in the relationship between the Argentine musician and the Cuban filmmaker was Pablo Milanés.
“Pablo built a bridge of absolute complicity between us,” said Pin Villar. “The relationship between Silvio Rodriguez and my father is very similar to that of Pablo with Fito. At a very difficult time in his early life, my father protected him. Through the friendship between the two of them, I got to know Pablo. I was a teenager when our friendship really began. And we kept talking until a few days before entering the hospital on the way to the hell of the troubadours,” he added.
The text also mentions Páez’s statements, in which “he shows a deep love for the Cuban people, his friends and his artists, and an initial fascination with the Revolution. But also a disenchantment, not necessarily linked to the ideas, but to the methods and officials who carried it out, even with Fidel himself…
In this regard, the interview concludes with the question “Do you share Fito’s vision?”, to which the Cuban artist responds: “If I didn’t share his vision it would have been difficult for me to include it in the documentary. Just as I draw a woman’s face to my liking, I divide the mouth into lips, the happy eyes, I place what I imagine will be her face, that’s how I work with ideas. They are the elements that I use to draw the face of the documentary. His narrative.”
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