Sueños al pairo (Dreams Adrift 2020): On censorship, archival footage, and independent Cuban film

In this article, I offer an analysis of the Cuban documentary Sueños al pairo ( Dreams Adrift ), which was scheduled to premiere in April 2020 at Havana’s young filmmakers’ annual showcase. While the documentary was immediately censored preventing its premiere, I examine how the filmmakers José Luis Aparicio Ferrera and Fernando Fraguela Fosado use multiple levels of hidden, and lost archival footage and memory to create a platform for the censored lyricist Mike Porcel to write him back into Cuban musical history in their documentary. Through the inclusion of the archived past, I consider how the documentary contests what Derrida refers to as archival house arrest by bringing the hidden images and stories back into the present. In doing so, I explore Arenillas and Furtado’s research on the relationship between documentary and the law, to consider how documenting the past in the public present creates a space for intervention. While state censorship of artists is not new in Cuban film, Sueños differs because it does not focus solely on the government’s responsibility; instead, it also studies the role of his artistic community in contributing directly to his silencing and does so from island-based filmmakers in dialogue with the diaspora. Despite a promising new legal framework for independent cinema, the censorship of Sueños ’s premier appeared as a continuation of the same control Porcel had experienced years before. However, I show how the resounding artistic community response rejecting the film’s 2020 censorship and its refusal to premiere their own films, points to a rupture with Porcel’s censorship and Cuban film’s past, thus highlighting a space for artistic solidarity absent in Porcel’s time.