The Padilla Affair
Biography
•
1h 18m
Directed by Pavel Giroud • Documentary • With Heberto Padilla, Gabriel García Márquez • 2022 • 78 minutes
Spring 1971, Havana: The poet Heberto Padilla is released from jail and appears at a meeting of the Cuban writers' guild where he spouts, in his own words, a "heartfelt self-criticism." He proceeds to self-incriminate, declaring his status as a counterrevolutionary agent and accusing many of his attending colleagues, including his wife, of the same crime. A month before, his arrest under the accusation of attacking the security of the Cuban state, mobilized the intellectual vanguard of the entire world, who addressed a letter to Fidel Castro, leader of the Cuban Revolution, with whom they previously sympathized, demanding freedom for the poet, whose only sin was to dissent and criticize through his poetic work. Punctuated by interventions from Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Edwards, Carlos Fuentes and Fidel Castro, The Padilla Affair is an astonishing documentary that opens a window to explore aspects of Cuba's past that reverberate in its present, such as the lack of freedom of expression and the struggles of the cultural collective to obtain it.
Up Next in Biography
-
Violette Leduc, In Pursuit of Love
Directed by Esther Hoffenberg • Documentary • 2013 • 57 minutes
After decades of working in relative obscurity, author and memoirist Violette Leduc exploded onto the French literary scene in 1964 with the publication of her taboo-breaking memoir The Bastard. Engaging frankly with her experience ...
-
Draw Me Saint-Exupery
Directed by Andrès Jarach • Documentary • 2017 • 52 minutes
On the 31st of July 1944, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea. With this mystery, a myth was born.
Who was the man whose book The Little Prince was translated into more than 250 languages and dialects? Draw ...
-
In Search of Memory
Directed by Petra Seeger • Documentary • With Eric Kandel • 2008 • 95 minutes
'Memory is everything. Without it we are nothing,' says neuroscientist Eric Kandel, winner of the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking research on the physiology of the brain's storage of memories. As he explains, memory...