Tent City | Festival opening session

Recently restored using digital techniques by Filmoteca de Catalunya, Tent City (1980) is one of the essential documentary films that were made about the Cuban exile. The programme curator, José Luis Aparicio Ferrera (who will also mediate the post-screening Q&A session with Miñuca and Fernando Villaverde) reveals the film and its director to us: a legendary figure among the youngest generations of Cuban filmmakers and audiences.

The I-95 is the longest road on the east coast of the United States of America. There is no motorway between Cuba and the United States, only the Straits of Florida: a narrow highway of the seas that is no less busy than the I-95 at times. A route was carved from south to north across its uncertain currents by the marielitos, the varied community of over 120,000 Cubans who left their island between April and October 1980. The unlikely intersection of these two highways was the so-called “Tent City”, an improvised migrant camp that was created beneath the columns holding up the I-95 in Miami where Little Havana ends.

Tent City explores that microcosmos and reveals the day-to-day life of several refugees. Its director, Miñuca Villaverde (also responsible for the photography and editing), was rediscovering the country from which she exiled herself 15 years ago alongside her husband, Fernando Villaverde (another filmmaker and writer), who is the sound engineer and co-author of the film. The author tells us that the tents were home “to men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals, whose lives were only separated by cloth curtains hanging between the beds like floating walls”.

Before her very eyes, the “new revolutionary man” revealed himself to her; no longer a remnant of the old society. From what hell were they escaping to be so happy in those military tents? How could they feel free packed in so tightly and surrounded by fences? The piercing gaze of Miñuca penetrates the masses; those who the Cuban government defined as “dregs” and said were unwanted, unnecessary. She films each person face-on, looking into the camera, using no other tools besides her curious fixation, her desire to understand and her will to make friends. In the absence of synchronic sound, she proposes a voice in off. The fixed photograph. Boundaries becomes style.

The Miñuca who narrates in English with an accent is precise, even distant. Yet the Miñuca behind the camera caresses the subjects, generating intimacy within the confines of the tents. There is empathy without victimhood, ethnography with feeling. Her camera gravitates towards the queer among the crowd. “Perhaps they, as the most discriminated among the homeless, touched my sensitivity more than others, and I dedicated a large part of the film to them. Or perhaps it was they who took over the film...”, she says. Together with its characters, the film waits; it sculpts time for a sort of purgatory between a past that nobody wants to talk about and a future made up by hope and uncertainty in equal parts.

Moving and reflexive at the same time, Tent City, one of the essential films about the Cuban diaspora ­—or from the cinema of the “Great Cuba”, to use the term coined by the academic Ana López— reveals for our times a fleeting and precarious human landscape that was condemned to disappear or, as seen in Scarface (Brian de Palma, 1983), to be vampirised by Hollywood. The restless and sensitive images by Miñuca, filmed at point-blank range on her 16mm Bolex, return to us these human beings who were discarded by History in their incessant search for agency and liberty.

José Luis Aparicio Ferrera