Event

MALUALA

Dir. Sergio Giral
CUBA, 95 minutes
In Spanish with English Subtitles

With several historical films reflecting on the experience of slavery in Cuba, Sergio Giral is perhaps Cuba's best known Afro-Cuban director. In Maluala, he takes up the subject of Cubas Palenques, a network of about 30 communities hidden in Cuba's Eastern coast mountains comprised of runaway slaves with different ethnic origins, but a common cultural rejection of the bondage that brought them across the Atlantic.

Among these was Maluala, whose chief, Gallo, present a petition to be left alone by the Colonial government. The counteroffer is for the habitants of the Palenques to turn themselves in before being formally freed, a proposition three other chiefs accept, but Gallo refuses in a conflict reminiscent of Gillo Pontecorvo's divide-and-conquer epic BURN!, only from the colonized's perspective.