With Heberto Padilla, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Edwards, Carlos Fuentes, Fidel Castro
Why you must-see this film. Because back in 1971, the affair was a global public outrage where more than 60 intellectuals, including Susan Sontag, Alberto Moravia, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mario Vargas Llosa, Marguerite Duras, Julio Cortázar, and more, complained against Padilla’s incarceration. Because the real footage was smuggled out of Cuba in a way director Pavel Giroud declines to reveal. And because film critic Ruby Rich says, “It may well be the most original documentary of the year.”
In the spring of 1971 in Havana, poet Heberto Padilla is released from prison and attends a Cuban writers’ guild meeting. During the gathering, he delivers what he describes as a “heartfelt self-criticism,” admitting to being a counterrevolutionary agent and accusing many colleagues, including his wife, of the same offense.
Just a month earlier, Padilla’s arrest on charges of endangering the security of the Cuban state had sparked a global response from the intellectual community. Supporters, who had previously sympathized with Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution, wrote a letter demanding the poet’s freedom. Padilla’s only “sin” was expressing dissent and criticism through his poetry.
The Padilla Affair, punctuated by interventions from Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Edwards, Carlos Fuentes, and Fidel Castro, stands as an astonishing documentary. It provides a window into exploring facets of Cuba’s history that continue to resonate in the present.
