'Calls from Moscow' Wins Important Prize at Film Festival in Spain

March 12, 2024

The film, directed by Luis Alejandro Yero, won the Best Feature Film Award at the International Film Festival of Murcia.

The Cuban documentary Calls from Moscow, directed by Luis Alejandro Yero and censored in December at the Havana Film Festival, recently won the Best Feature Film Award at the fourteenth edition of the International Film Festival of Murcia (IBAFF).

The jury was composed of filmmakers Patxi Burillo, Irene M. Borrego and Daniela Urzola and decided unanimously to award the prize for the "skillful way of articulating form with a powerful and current political discourse that, with few elements, manages to portray the collective spirit of a community marked by the tension between isolation and hyperconnectivity."

In awarding the prize, which included a monetary contribution of 10,000 euros, IBAFF described Yero's film as a work "focused on a group of individuals 'misfits' due to particular circumstances that keep them in a kind of limbo."

The center of the film are the stories of four Cuban exiles seeking asylum in Moscow prior to the invasion of Ukraine. "In their phone calls, present and future coexist: their struggles as queer and undocumented immigrants, and the exchanges with the film's director following the outbreak of war," IBAFF stated.

Calls from Moscow has had a previous trajectory that validates the jury's decision. In February 2023, it had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, a venue where it was presented by its director and received a good reception from audiences and critics. The documentary was also part of the selection of the IV INSTAR Film Festival, organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism.

However, the film was excluded from the most recent edition of the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, which took place in Havana between December 8 and 17, 2023. According to the filmmaker, a graduate of the International School of Film and Television (EICTV) of San Antonio de los Baños.

In a post on his Instagram profile, Yero stated that his film was censored "for some uncomfortable phrases that point to the collapse and lack of morality of a Government that covertly supports Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which has brought ruin to an entire country and caused the largest exodus in Cuba's history—more than 500,000 people in a year and a half, equivalent to 5% of its population—which has its youth scattered across the world and, as some of the film's participants say, would rather be at minus 20 degrees, undocumented and in the most homophobic country in Europe, than return to Cuba."

Calls from Moscow is a co-production between Cuba, Germany and Norway. It is the second independent production that addresses the topic of the migratory exodus Cuba is experiencing. In mid-2022, Zero Option, a feature film by Cuban director Marcel Beltrán, participated in the important International Film Festival of Locarno, in Switzerland.