The movie Plantedby the Cuban director Lilo VilaplanaPremiere this Friday in Havana, coinciding with Cuban Culture Day and in the presence of independent journalists and prominent opponents of the Cuban regime.
The film by filmmakers Camilo and Lilo Vilaplana was seen and commented on by opponents and activists Angel Moya, Berta Soler, Regina Coyula, Manuel Cuesta Morua, Fabio Corchadoas well as the journalists Camila Acosta And Claudia Montero and the writer Angel Santiestebanone of the film’s screenwriters.
After the presentation of the film, the independent media CubaNet conducted a live broadcast where participants were able to interact via video call with Vilaplana, who took part in the session.
Former political prisoner Ángel Moya, one of the 75 detainees Black Spring of Cuba in 2003thanked the Plantadas filmmakers for “keeping historical memory alive.”
“All these materials, everything that is written about the struggle, about what the activists, the opponents, the exiles are going through… serve to make ordinary people aware of why sometimes things are forgotten because they are not written. “We must update, we must publish so that people become aware and see the crimes of Castroism,” Moya said.
Coyula and Cuesta Morúa also recognized the historical value of the film. “The fraud that the film tries to convey is precisely the fraud that all these political prisoners suffered,” said the historian Cuesta Morúa, founder of the organization Arco Progresista in 2002, of which he is currently chairman, and the organizations of a social democratic nature united.
For the opponent, the film is able to “save through the image the role that these women played at the same time as the men who rose up against Castroism.”
For his part, Vilaplana thanked for the comments and praise for his film and emphasized that it was about the topic Political prisoners in Cuba “It’s not just the past, but also the present.” Since then historic 11J protests in CubaThe Cuban regime holds more than a thousand political prisoners in prison, serving long prison sentences for exercising their right to freedom of expression and demonstration.
The film premiered in Miami at the end of March It spent several consecutive weeks on the billboard and garnered record audiencesalthough it competes with Hollywood blockbusters.
“We are very pleased with the reception of the Miami audience, who greeted the film with affection and left the screening rooms moved,” Vilaplana said at the time.
Plantadas tells the story of Cuban political prisoners who refused to submit to Castroism’s prison discipline. “They were minors, they were detained as minors and some served almost 20 years in prison,” Vilaplana explained in an interview with EFE agency.
The film was recently shown in several cinemas in Canada and won the Best International Film award at the Toronto Independent Festival of Cift.
In 2021, Vilaplana premiered Plantados, a film that tells the story of those political prisoners of the Cuban regime who, since the 1960s, refused to wear the prison uniform and who were subjected to systematic torture for this act of rebellion.
“Art is such a powerful weapon that Castroism used it to subjugate, indoctrinate and change Cuba’s history. It is time for the boomerang of truth to be returned to them and for art to break through the heart of Cubans.” Dictatorship. And it is happening, the best thing is that it will happen,” Vilaplana said in one Interview published by CiberCuba in April.
Although Vilaplana pointed out at the time that Plantadas was not a second part of his previous film but a different film, both works expose human rights violations in the Cuban prison system.