Miami, Feb. 15, 2017 – Miami Dade College’s (MDC) renowned Tower Theater and Tres Musas Producciones will present, for the first time in Miami, independent Cuban filmmaker Eduardo del Llano and three of his acclaimed short films Brainstorm (2009), Casting (2013) and Epica (2015) at 7 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 23. The films are in Spanish with English subtitles. There will be a Q & A with Del Llano and actors Alberto Pujols and Tomas Cao after the screening.
Renowned screenwriter and filmmaker Del Llano caused some commotion among cultural and official government institutions on the island with the underground release and grassroots distribution of his short film Monte Rouge (2004), where he introduced the character Nicanor O’Donnell, which was later developed in other films. Actor Luis Alberto Garcia plays the role of Nicanor, an average guy who is approached by Cuban state security to tell on his friends who criticize the regime.
His satirical shorts have not received support from Cuba’s cultural department, nor have been distributed nationally, but they have amassed a cult following. Del Llano also wrote the films Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas (1991) and La pelicula de Ana (2012), directed by Daniel Diaz Torres, and La vida es silbar (1998) by Fernando Perez.
In Brainstorm, the advisory committee of a newspaper decides if the news of a meteor killing more than a hundred people in Cuba should go on the front page or not, based on the country’s interests.
Casting is about actors’ struggles in order to get work in a movie. In Epica, a revolutionary travels back in time to meet Cuban author Virgilio Piñera and tries to warn him about what will happen to intellectuals on the island in the future.
Tickets: General public $11.50 per person; MDC staff, seniors and students (non-MDC) $9; Tower Theater members, Film Society members and MDC students $7.