Landrián (2023)

When Nicolás Guillén Landrián died in Miami in 2003, it had been just over 30 years since he’d made his last Cuban film. In the intervening period he was ostracised by the state, his films banned, eventually going into exile in 1989. In 2019 Ernesto Daranas started a concerted effort to restore his films from the materials in the Cuban film archives.
Made by Daranas to accompany his restoration work, Landrián attempts to comprehend a filmmaker tragically caught between the desire to follow his vision and a revolution with a different conception of the artist’s role. Landrián oscillates between testimonies of the filmmaker’s widow Gretel Alfonso and his collaborator Livio Delgado, with Landrián’s journals and poems, and documents from the Cuban state security files, filling out this sensitive portrait of a filmmaker whose on-screen signature was the phrase “Fin pero no es el fin” – the end, but not really.