Epicentro

Director: Hubert Sauper. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize, World Cinema Documentary Competition, 2020 Sundance Film Festival, English and Spanish with English subtitles

The latest film from Academy Award–nominated director Hubert Sauper (Darwin’s Nightmare) offers a typically complex and frankly bracing consideration of the past, present, future, and mythology of Cuba. Sauper dials back to the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898 to pinpoint the origins of destructive geopolitics that also overlap with the origins of cinema, and thus with the origins of cinematic misinformation, as an entry into presenting his own new (and mindfully fraught) images of the people of Havana. Epicentro challenges viewers to get beyond received notions of a society ambered and isolated in time—notions that locals are more than familiar with—by following wise young people who are angling for a future. Sauper never floats a question without casting it upon himself, and never makes a picture without inviting us to scrutinize how and why it was made, making his cinema—and Epicentro especially—an invaluable, morally vital arena for reflections on the state of film, humanity, and the world. Shot and edited by the director himself, it is also a gorgeously handmade work of art.

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