Italy bets on love and pain at Havana Film Festival

Havana, December 15 (RHC) -- Italian filmmaker Tommaso Santambrogio is betting on love and the pain caused by separation from a loved one with his film ¨Los océanos son los verdaderos continentes¨, as part of the 44th International New Latin American Film Festival.

The feature film, the filmmaker's debut feature, competes in the same category and can be seen again by the public this Thursday at 3:00 p.m. local time at the Acapulco cinema.

Shot with beautiful black-and-white photography in the Cuban city of San Antonio de los Baños, the film earned Santambrogio the Bisato d'Oro Award for best direction at the 80th Venice International Film Festival.

The Oceans Are the Real Continents (2023) is an extended version of his short film of the same name, awarded at the Venice International Critics' Week in 2019 and subsequently shown at several international festivals.

In a two-hour journey, the viewer is complicit in the love between Alex (Alexander Diego) and Edith (Edith Ybarra Clara), a young couple who live their romance made of small everyday gestures, stories of the past, nostalgia and deep intimacy.

They are joined by the stories of Milagros (Milagros Llanes Martínez), a retired woman who sells peanut cones; and Frank (Frank Ernesto Lam) and Alain (Alain Alfonso González), two nine-year-old friends who dream of emigrating to the United States to play in Major League Baseball (MLB).

About the film, which opened the 20th Giornate degli Autori, the specialized critics point out that there are certain images to which we are exposed as children and which remain engraved in our memory forever.

This was the case of the young filmmaker, who told in an interview that he witnessed a heartbreaking embrace between a father and daughter when he was eight years old, at an airport in Cuba.

From this image, knowing the people of Cuba, knowing that migration, and forced separation is something intrinsic and characteristic of the whole society, I decided I wanted to work on this theme," he said.

Competing with her in the same category are ¨La mujer salvaje¨ (Cuba), by Alán González; ¨Los colonos¨ (Chile), by Felipe Gálvez; ¨Sem Coração¨ (Brazil), by Nara Normande; ¨A Cielo Abierto¨ (Mexico), by Mariana and Santiago Arriaga, among many others.

Under the slogan "Green Light: Action!", the largest gathering of the seventh art in the country will invade the lives of moviegoers and the main cinemas of this capital city until December 17, along with the passion that awakens the best of the region's cinematography. (Source: Prensa Latina)