Sueños al pairo
Item
Title / Título (Original)
Sueños al pairo
Title
Dreams Adrift
Release Date / Fecha de estreno
2021
Language / Idioma
Spanish / español
Country / País
Production Company / Compañía de Producción
Estudio ST (Cuba)
Juan Primito Productions (U.S.)
Juan Primito Productions (U.S.)
Description / Descripción
Mike Porcel es el integrante perdido de la Nueva Trova cubana: su falta de espíritu revolucionario lo condenó al repudio de sus compañeros y lo transformó en paria durante una década, hasta que logró exiliarse. Sin rencor, pero sin olvido, la película reconstruye su historia y revive un fulgor olvidado. (Film Affinity ES)
Sueños al pairo (Dreams Adrift) is a thirty-minute Cuban independent documentary by on-island documentarians José Luis Aparicio Ferrera and Fernando Fraguela Fosado. It captures the story of lyricist Mike Porcel, who had been written out of Cuban musical history despite the fact that on-island artists still perform his arrangements. The documentary explores Porcel’s career becoming one of Cuba’s distinguished artists in the 1960s-1970s Nueva Trova music movement, which often connected folk traditions with progressive social consciousness, along with sympathies to the Cuban Revolution. While a number of Nueva Trova songwriters were considered Cuba’s cultural ambassadors, such as celebrated musician Silvio Rodríguez appearing in the documentary, the film shares that Porcel’s experience with the state was quite different. The fact that he combined international musical influences with poetic lyrics resulted in Porcel’s becoming persona-non-grata status on the island. While his artistic archive remained free to circulate, divorced from his name, he was denied the right to fully exist or leave. Weaving together the personal with the political in a film whose title quotes one of Porcel’s songs, the documentary serves as a platform to reconnect Porcel’s voice with his archive. It also reveals that it was not opposition politics that led to the lyricist’s erasure from Cuban music; rather, it was Porcel’s commitment to poetry and musical creation instead of writing explicitly pro-revolutionary political lyrics that was deemed unacceptable, and later criminalized. [Farrell, Michelle L. "Sueños al pairo (Dreams Adrift 2020): On censorship, archival footage, and independent Cuban film. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, vol. 9, no. 7, pp. 24-40. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5070/T49755853.
Category / Categoría
Cinematic Period / Periodo cinematográfico
Collection
Citation
“Sueños al pairo,” Cinegogía, accessed April 23, 2024, https://cinegogia.omeka.net/items/show/788.