Momentary Shelter: Miguel Coyula and Lynn Cruz Discuss the Risks of Making ‘Chronicles of the Absurd’

State restrictions in Cuba have turned independent filmmaking into a challenge, but with Chronicles of the Absurd, Miguel Coyula and Lynn Cruz show that where there’s a will, there’s a way. Coyula, the director, uses clandestine recordings of Cruz and others in encounters with authorities inside Cuba, whether when trying to hold a screening, or when asking evasive hospital staff for information about her father’s sudden decline in health. Instead of relying on video or explanatory interviews, Coyula lets the riveting audio tell the story, augmented with speakers’ avatars, text, stills of Cruz, and a little animation, plus music ranging from Cuban classical composer Ignacio Cervantes to the punk rock band Porno Para Ricardo.

It’s a documentary created at great risk for both Coyula, who also directed the dystopian fiction film Corazón Azul, and especially Cruz, an independent theater director. Cruz is a deeply inspiring presence as she fights for her rights from minute to minute. After its world premiere at IDFA, Chronicles of the Absurd was awarded the Best Film in the Envision Competition. Earlier in the festival, I spoke to Coyula and Cruz earlier in their first interview about the film.

DOCUMENTARY: After seeing this film, I began to think that you must have an audio recorder running a lot of the time in your life.

MIGUEL COYULA: We do it when we sense that there is an upcoming situation.

LYNN CRUZ: As a witness. 

D: What was the starting point for turning your recordings into a documentary?

MC: I did a web series with some of the audio, really as a way of protecting us. There are two ways of doing things in Cuba. Some people hide whatever troubles or tragedies fall upon them and think that it will fade away. But we have always said the best way is to be transparent about everything that happens to us, and so we released the audio of Javier Caso, the photographer [who is interrogated by Cuban agents]. We were thinking, well, it’s going to be good or bad if we do this, but it ended up being good. 

LC: In Cuba we have this black market. Nobody can survive without this black market. In a way, to be an independent, it’s to be in the black market. We are in this grey area. For example, when we were doing a screening in a private gallery, it was the first audio recording we got. We knew that we were in this strange situation because [the audience would be] artists and also activists. The police or the state security will be there, and what can we do if we don’t have a witness or we don’t have protection? 

D: At what point did you feel as if you had enough material for a feature film? 

MC: After we finished Corazón Azul, a friend of mine told me it would be interesting if you put this [audio] together as some kind of Cuban chronicles. I felt it could be an interesting challenge because it’s apparently an intrinsically anti-cinematic idea: still pictures and sound. It was a challenge to see if I could hold the interest of an audience with that format. It is a format that was born out of necessity, because in Cuba if you point a camera at someone in a society where people are living with two faces all of the time, they will behave differently, or they will take away the camera if they call an agent. So I thought it was a good way of doing an x-ray of the society when they don’t know they are being recorded. 

Many of these individuals, the bureaucrats and the agents, are acting under state pressure which makes them say things that are absurd. In fact, all of the episodes are absurd in one way or another. So I felt it could be like a Kafkaesque structure. For example, when Lynn gets fired from the acting agency, we released her audio of her trial, and then they called her again and said, “Oh, we’ll take you back, but within 30 days we’re going to fire you again because we didn’t notify you.” So we released that audio, and again they say, “Oh, you’re back again.” But now they wrote that she had a “passive” status, which means she was out of the country and that’s why she couldn’t work, and nobody else called her for auditioning again. 

All of these strange behaviors are very much [part] of the Cuban society in the last 60 years, so we felt a responsibility. Lynn and I were talking about it: I wish I didn’t have to make the film, and she always said that she wish she didn’t have to participate. 

D: It sounds like independent filmmaking in Cuba now is not exactly what we think of as independent filmmaking. 

MC: In Cuba, independent filmmaking before 2019 was in a legal limbo. We didn’t exist. Well, we still don’t exist, but after 2019 they created Decree 373 which legalizes independent filmmaking. But they have to approve your scripts, and the content has to be within the liberties allowed by the Cuban Revolution. They did offer some advantages, like money from co-productions. A lot of people went for that, and they thought, “Well, I can get away with things, I can put it on paper and then I can do what I want.” But we’ve seen in the last five years that it wasn’t the case, because then they get in trouble and then it’s on paper that they have a contract.

LC: And most of the filmmakers have left the country in the last three years.

D: You traveled with the fiction film Corazón Azul to a number of festivals. How did that affect your decision to travel with Chronicles of the Absurd?

MC: When it’s science fiction, there’s something about it that lets you [do it], because it’s not true. I don’t know how they will react to this film once we go back, because nobody knew we were making this film, not even our friends. We wouldn’t tell anybody, not because we distrusted them, but because Cuba is such a small cultural community. It’s a risk we are willing to take. To me making films is the reason I wake up every morning. The only thing I can have control of is making films.

LC: But you can feel the tension, the pressure of the system. The news about the film was online one month ago [when IDFA announced premieres in October].

MC: But it’s a world-class festival, so it was protection. Orwa’s words at the press conference were like a shelter, in a way, momentarily. I don’t know what’s going to happen, because many times they don’t really strike at a moment like this but a little later.

D: The use of audio in the film, without much moving image, has its own effects. Watching the film, I also felt like I didn’t know what was coming next. 

MC: It’s the first time we see it on a big screen [here], and we realized that it really works. I wanted to have this black void and only when there is a spoken word, you see the image, the avatar of the person speaking, and the text. And because we cannot see the person, sometimes the intensity of the spoken words is enhanced by the size of the letters and the layout of the structure. Because that’s all I had. And I thought having this black space makes you imagine the location and the actions. I use only very limited animation. So it’s a film about language in that sense. I wish you could see it in Spanish because, for example, the agents who interrogate Javier Caso are very inarticulate. They sound like criminals. 

D: Oh, I definitely felt that they were kind of swaggering, with a certain machismo.

LC: Yes, yes! Absolutely. 

D: They don’t sound very official.

LC: Exactly. And another thing is that you cannot see the faces and you cannot see the locations. For example, in my trial, there was a room full of people.  

MC: And [you don’t see] when Javier Caso arrived [at his interrogation], they asked him to surrender his cell phone. So he gave his real cell phone, but he had strapped another one under his shirt. It’s funny, because they say we are the fifth-best police in the world! But we heard that afterward they were doing thorough searches of some journalists after we released the audio of the interrogations.

D: Why did you choose to use paintings as avatars for people speaking in the movie?

MC: Well, I didn’t want to have to resort to interviews to explain what happened, but I wanted to have the facts as much as possible. And I couldn’t find pictures of many of these bureaucrats and agents. So I animated the paintings because Antonia Eiriz is fascinating to me. She started painting in the 1950s, very much in an expressionist school. She did really touch the fiber of Cuban society. But she was censored in 1968, and she stopped painting when they told her that her paintings were damaging the revolution, they were pessimistic. She really believed in the revolution. So she started teaching, and it wasn’t until 1993 that she started painting again when she emigrated to Miami. She lived only for two more years but she did a lot of work in those two years, and exactly in the same style she left in 1968. 

D: The movie has so many layers, and it’s very personal in other ways too. What went into the sequence about Lynn’s father in the hospital?

LC: It was pretty hard for me because in my mind I was trying to save my dad, and at the same time I was recording, and it was this ambivalent feeling. I was trying to get justice, and it’s impossible to get justice in this situation. Then I felt finally that I can get justice, because this truth is [being brought] into the light. It’s not just for my dad or for us, it’s because the population is dying because they have no choice. There are patients with cancer, for example, who cannot get treatment, and they are dying and nobody can say that. Nobody can talk because they are persecuting what the population is posting on Facebook. They go after you and they intimidate you.

MC: Healthcare in Cuba for a long time was one of the biggest assets of the revolution. And it’s in shambles now, really. It’s very corrupt. 

D: I’ve heard that even sending the film’s DCP for the first time was complicated.

LC: Oh, this is a good story. 

MC: Yes. I mean, sending a DCP from Cuba using the Cuban internet is... forget it. So a programmer from BAFICI, a friend of mine, was teaching at the film school in Cuba. Neither Lynn nor I can teach at the film school. So we went late at night after all the academic staff had left and nobody could recognize us. The guard was a young guy who didn’t know us, and we said that we were going to see this friend of ours, and he let us in. And we did the transfer [of the DCP]. Then we tried our luck, and we said, well, what if we go to the dining room? And we did it and we were able to eat! 

Nicolas Rapold is the host of the podcast The Last Thing I Saw, a frequent contributor to numerous publications, and former editor-in-chief of Film Comment. He is editing a book of interviews with Frederick Wiseman.