Synopsis
Spanish with English subtitles
With Daniela Muñoz Barroso
Filmmaker Daniela Muñoz Barroso, nearly deaf and relying on her eyes as much as her ears, embarks on a journey to Santiago de Cuba to uncover the legacy of Mafifa, an extraordinary musician who defied social norms to play the bell, a metal percussion instrument traditionally reserved for men in Cuban conga.
Decades after Mafifa’s untimely death, Barroso follows traces of her story through conversations with those who remember her as a brilliant musician and fearless woman who challenged the machismo around her. As Barroso delves deeper into Mafifa’s world, capturing vibrant landscapes and the resilient people of Santiago, her search becomes an intimate exploration of her own insecurities and passions, reflecting her personal connection with Mafifa’s spirit.
About the Director
Daniela Muñoz Barroso (Havana, 1994) ia a documentary filmmaker, producer, and cinematographer. She is a Cinematography Graduate from Cuba’s Universidad de las Artes. She Co-founded the Havana-based indie production company Estudio ST. She produced and or directed several short films. Her medium-length documentary ¿Qué remedio? La Parranda (60′, 2018), premiered nationally at Havana Film Festival. Mafifa is her debut feature-length documentary.
Press
“A dynamic portrait of late Cuban conga musician Mafifa. A rare, welcome example of a biographical documentary whose own style matches the unorthodox and radical example of its subject.” – Neil Young, Screen Daily
“The film manages to calibrate, with surprising authenticity, an aesthetic experience full of revelations, which, without pose of stylistic transcendence, it enhances the sharpness of the its discourse and transforms it into something more.” – Ángel Pérez, Rialta
“In Mafifa, director Daniela Muñoz Barroso creates a sensory feast that uses the power of cinema to share the experience of progressive hearing loss.” – Nick Cunningham, Business Doc Europe
Notes on the Film
“I went to Santiago de Cuba looking for Mafifa, a woman who played conga forty years ago in a world totally controlled by men (and what men! big, strong, energetic, many times drunk macho-men). I was always curious: what was she doing there? How did she get in? I still wonder, and those questions became the initial impetus and, later, the motive for the film.
I wrote a project, got on a truck and left … While on the road I let myself be carried away by the maelstrom of the Santiago conga. In the midst of that drowsiness, I sometimes couldn’t help thinking I was missing the essentials. But what was essential anyway? For me, obviously it couldn’t be the sound of the bell —a metal percussion musical instrument who only men could play, and which was inaudible to me. It had to be something bigger. Maybe some sort of a tunnel that was being built while I carried out my research; a shadowy space between the ideal Mafifa that I was putting together in my mind, and my own quest for freedom.
I am still that person who wonders what freedom is like. Somehow, someway, I started to realize that more important than that, I wanted to know whether Mafifa had been happy. Suddenly, it came to my attention that maybe what is essential is something simpler, like a melody. I got lost along the way, however, and suddenly I reached the sea…”
Excerpt from a conversation with Daniela Muñoz Barroso – originally published in Spanish by Revista Cine Cubano Magazine
