Screening of the documentary El caso Padilla (The Padilla affair)

The film is in Spanish with English subtitles. The Q&A will be in Spanish.

This is an in-person only event with no streaming.

Watch the trailer of the film here

Speakers: Pavel Giroud, Director; Lía Rodríguez, Producer; Alejandro Hernández, Producer.
Moderated by: Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics; Professor of African and African American Studies, Director, Afro-Latin American Research Institute, Chair, Cuba Studies Program.

Spring 1971, Havana: The poet Heberto Padilla is released from jail and appears at a meeting of the Cuban writers' guild where he spouts, in his own words, a "heartfelt self-criticism." He proceeds to self-incriminate, declaring his status as a counterrevolutionary agent and accusing many of his attending colleagues, including his wife, of the same crime. A month before, his arrest under the accusation of attacking the security of the Cuban state, mobilized the intellectual vanguard of the entire world, who addressed a letter to Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution, with whom they previously sympathized, demanding freedom for the poet, whose only sin was to dissent and criticize through his poetic work. The writer's filmed mea culpa, shown to the public for the first time, marks the narrative line of a story, punctuated by interventions from Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Edwards, Carlos Fuentes and Fidel Castro. Spanish-Cuban filmmaker Pavel Giroud’s feature El caso Padilla (The Padilla Affair) may well be the most original documentary of the year precisely because of what it does not do: tinker with the archive. Similarly focused on tracing history, it avoids accumulation or pastiche in favor of a dedication to one singular relic: a box of Betamax reels whose provenance— out of history and out of Cuba—Giroud declines to reveal. The “Padilla affair” was a notorious case of ideological warfare that riveted Cuba and the world in 1971. Cuba’s internationally renowned poet Heberto Juan Padilla was jailed and, once released, publicly renounced his own writing as a betrayal of the Cuban Revolution. Giroud’s box had recordings of that signal speech in its entirety; transferred, edited down, and restored to luminous black-and-white, they yield a riveting record of political consequences. Giroud’s distillation captures Padilla’s act of self-demolition, performed in front of comrades who sit transfixed in a crowded room, waiting for his punitive gaze to rest on each of them in turn as he delivers his and their own condemnation—including, shockingly, of his own wife. In this cross between a Stalinist show trial and a homegrown Soy Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964), Giroud has sculpted the found footage into an explosive time capsule, maintaining the purity of the record to remind viewers of what’s at stake for intellectual freedom.

  -"El caso Padilla is beautiful and chilling, and as historical as it is contemporary". Ruby Rich - Film Quaterly

The screening of this film will be followed by a Q&A with the Director and Producers.

Pavel Giroud, Cuban filmmaker based in Spain. Made his way into cinema from Videoart where he was recognized as a creator of music videos and short promotional work. With the film “Tres veces dos”, in which he wrote and directed one of the three stories that was incorporated, he rose to new heights and received the Zenith de Plata for best Opera Prima in the Montreal Film Festival. His first solo achievement, “La Edad de la Peseta” (Mediapro-ICAIC), the Cuban entry in for the Oscars in 2006 and nominated to a Goya by the Academia de Cine Española (Academy of Spanish Cinema), was premiered in the Toronto’s International Film Festival and won several international awards. The University of Huston included it among 7 other Hispanic films by Buñuel, Almodóvar, Erice and Cuerda, in the study program for “Modern and Classic Languages: Spanish Films”. In 2020 Cuba’s Cinemateca chose it as one among the 10 films with the Best Cinematography, and Best Art Direction in the history of Cuban Cinema. His next movie, “Omerta” (ABRA PROD-ICAIC), won the Coral Prize in the category for Best Original Screenplay at La Habana’s XXVII International Film Festival, and it premiered the following year in San Sebastián Film Festival. In 2014 he co-directed the documentary “Playing Lecuona”, starring the pianists Chucho Valdés, Michel Camilo, and Gonzalo Rubalcaba, with appearances by Ana Belén Raymundo Amador, Omara Portuondo, and other notable musicians. It was awarded the prize for Best Documentary at the Montreal Film Festival, and it also received the Merit Award at New York’s International Film Festival. “El Acompañante”, his fourth feature film, premiered on HBO USA following an extensive festival run, was his second Oscars entry representing his country, and was previously recognized as Best Developing Project along with the SGAE Julio Alejandro award it received for Best Ibero-American Screenplay, at the San Sebastian 61 Edition Film Festival. Furthermore, it was nominated at the Platinum Awards for Best Screenplay and at the Forqué Awards for Best Latin-American Movie of the Year. It also received the People’s Award at Miami, Toulouse, Málaga and La Habana (the 2nd prize), and Best Screenplay in HFF New York, where the Mayor of Brooklyn, EricAdams, awarded him a recognition for “the exceptional use of cinema as a social tool”.

Lía Rodríguez, Born in Havana in 1973. Lía is an independent producer whose credits include “The Companion”, by Pavel Giroud, and "Four seasons in Havana”, based on the best-selling novels by Leonardo Padura. Her work also includes the Olivier Assayas’ film “Wasp Network” which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and “Panama in a Day”, based on Scott Ridley’s ‘in a Day’ format, both in 2019. In 2022 she produced “The Padilla Affair”, by Pavel Giroud, feature doc that opened in Telluride and San Sebastian´s Horizontes Latinos. Lía has extensive experience managing international co-productions involving various countries, including Spain, Germany, France, and the UK, as well as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Canada. She is also member of the Spanish and European Film Academy.

Alejandro Hernández (Havana, Cuba, 1970), Cuban screenwriter and producer. After emigrating from Cuba in 1998, Alejandro has developed his career in the Spanish film industry. He has written 19 feature films and 6 television series, for which he has received 8 awards and 18 nominations. He is a script professor at the Carlos III University of Madrid and at the Prague Film School in the Czech Republic. He is also member of the Spanish and European Film Academy.