Vicenta B

“I grew up in Havana, in a house full of women and ghosts. My father abandoned us when I was little, so my grandmother, my mother, and I have always been on our own. My grandmother was enlightened and had the gift of seeing into the future by throwing the cards. She could also talk to the dead and perform spiritual “cleansing”. My mother, on the other hand, has always been quite fragile. Always sick and full of fears, she barely left the house at all.

What inspired me to make this film, was precisely the contrast between this magical ambiance that inhabited our home and the harsh reality outside. Along the script, we follow a woman who, without a backup plan, is forced to leave her comfort zone and venture into the unknown.

Topics such as soul searching, crises of faith, and family isolation are common in Western arthouse cinema. Films from our side of the world, however, tend to gravitate and set light to more hard-core visceral problems and situations, but: What happens when a black or poor woman has an existential crisis? An existential crisis has not appeared in Cuban cinema for years.

Vicenta B. shows a series of strong women, who seem to have been abandoned to their fate. Women who for many years have been relegated to the fringes of the country’s social life. I’d like to think that this film is different and that it will help to give voice to human beings who are and have always been somewhat marginalized by a majority that thinks it is entitled to define what they should be and how they should behave. This is a burden that we have been dragging since slavery and that is why this film is not just about my family. It is about an entire country, that, throughout its history, has had a very peculiar relationship with the concepts of freedom and faith.”

– Carlos Lechuga, Director