Listening to the Shadow

“Listening to the Shadow” [Escuchar la sombra] had its world premiere at the 45th Festival of Mew Latin American Cinema in Havana in 2024. It won the prize for Best Short Film at the  2025 Festival Family Film Project in Oporto and honourable mention at the 2025 Protest Festival of Catalonia.

“Listening to the Shadow” is a hymn to the memory of the so-called defeated who were never defeated, those who sacrificed and laid down their bodies for the sake of a better world. A work about the love of that Cuba for Republican Spain, for the modern, free and cultured ideas that were being forged there. It is also a film that vindicates what was left out of the official story of the mythical International Brigades, where thousands of anonymous people from Cuba were not included. It would seem that they had also been defeated by memory. The ‘forgetfulness’ in official history underpins the ideology of power. Creating alternative paths through history, casting light on people who are out of the spotlight, the people sidelined by the official story.

I am interested in the stories that never presumed to be told, that do not fit within those normative narratives, what Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik called “the beauty of the dislocated”.

Cuba was the last colony of the Spanish empire, and thousands of Cubans went clandestinely to Spain to defend the Second Republic against the threat of fascism and the Francoist coup. What until a little more than thirty years before had been called the “Pearl of the Indies” threw itself into the “Spanish Revolution”.

“Listening to the Shadow” offers an incisive, archaeological perspective through film, photographic, and audio archives, the vast majority of which have remained unpublished until now. It is a reflection that seeks to reveal the faces and commitment of those who went unnamed, those who arrived with a spark in their eyes and were left in the shadow of history. Black holes filled with light.

MGM