Los Puros (The Pure Ones)
Cuba
•
18m
Directed by Carla Valdés León • Documentary • 2024 • 19 minutes
A group of old friends reunite at a summer house in Varadero, Cuba. Their last meeting was in Minsk, mid-1980s: they were preparing to return home to Cuba after five years spent studying Marxist-Leninist philosophy in the Soviet Union.
The meeting triggers a flood of old memories and historical reminiscences. Drawn to the Soviet Union by an idealistic commitment to utopian socialism, the young students were disoriented by what they encountered: a society moving inexorably towards its own disintegration. This was the era of perestroika, when new reforms rapidly transformed Soviet society and undermined the old certainties of official ideology. What once appeared as a shining beacon of the future looked increasingly like an historical artifact destined to disappear.
Sitting around the table, reminiscing, and looking through old slides, the friends register the weight of history in their memories and conflicted emotions. LOS PUROS is a meditation on a vanished political world and its continued reverberations into the present day.
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