Tundra - José Luis Aparicio (Havana, Cuba)

Walfrido Larduet, a lonely electrical inspector, dreams of the Red Woman, whose image persists and becomes an obsession. Something tells him she is near. Over the course of a day, Walfrido will follow her trail as he travels through the suburbs of an infested city. Individuals, like beasts, are made of fears and desires. Tundra is a film about these drives, about all the frustration that leads to paralysis. Sometimes, Cuba seems -- to Cuban director José Luis Aparicio -- like a stopped landscape: the desolate wasteland where nothing grows, where nothing ever happens. The country has taken on the physical aspect of our inner chaos, it stands as a vestigial, post-disaster region. Here the catastrophe occurred silently at some point in the past. What came after is outside of history, it is the inconsistent survival of ghost citizens. This film delves into the ghostly aspect of a Cuban's life, usually driven by inertia and automatism, a life full of mental obstacles, where frustrated desires become entrenched and do not allow us to move forward. For this, we have chosen the aesthetics and codes of fantasy cinema. In Spanish, subtitled. 2021; 30 min.