Fernando Pérez exhibits film El mundo de Nelsito on Cuban screens

March 23, 2023

In commemoration of the 64th anniversary of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (Icaic), the feature film El mundo de Nelsito, by Fernando Pérez, will arrive today at the big screen of the Chaplin cinema, in Havana.

The film by the acclaimed Cuban director is the result of a collaboration between Icaic and the Spanish production company Wanda Films, based on the script written by Pérez and Abel Rodríguez, who also worked on the film Últimos días en La Habana (2016).

According to the Cubacine portal, filming took place at various locations in this city to narrate a plot that starts with a car accident.

Nelsito, the victim of the incident, is a 16-year-old autistic teenager who ran away from home, and while everyone worries about the young man, his imagination transports him to other moments and situations, linked to the people around him, the synopsis details.

«Thus, from his stretcher he creates fictions that reveal the dark and hidden side of all those around him: perverse children, murderous women, adorable con-artist girls», reviews film critic Joel del Río in the text published on the aforementioned digital site.

Upon his return home, now recovered, Nelsito is received by the characters that the spectator already knows, creating an atmosphere of disbelief about which are the authentic ones, the present ones or those that the teenager presented through his subjectivity.

The director articulated the audiovisual through five stories, related to various conflicts, in which all those who live in the stories imagined by Nelsito, in the skin of actor José Raúl Castro, from the accident and in the hospital.

The spectator is left with the task of assuming which are the authentic protagonists of this film, whether the ordinary mortals who receive the boy, or those he has imagined before our eyes, Del Río pointed out.

The cast of the film includes recognized names from the seventh art on the island such as Isabel Santos, Laura de la Uz, Jacqueline Arenal, Carlos Enrique Almirante, Paula Alí, Edith Massola, Mario Guerra, Ana Gloria Buduén, Armando Miguel Gómez, Mayra Mazorra, among others.

«El mundo de Nelsito turns out to be a choral and episodic film, which assumes certain oneiric-surrealist codes not strange in the author's filmography», while allowing a reunion with a filmmaker who is distinguished by making a difference and remaining «renewed, unique, humanist, philanthropic and creative».