News
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The preservation of Cuba’s film archives is an urgent race against time
OVER THE last year more than 15,000 children and teenagers have crowded into Cuban cinemas to see animations featuring Elpidio Valdés, restored with the help of funds raised by the Screen Cuba film festival. Elpidio is a cartoon character created for children in the 1970s by Juan Padrón, who symbolises the fight for Cuban independence…
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Cinema to the rescue
When Screen Cuba donated funds for the recently restored Clarín Mambí, an early cartoon by Cuba’s godfather of animation Juan Padrón, we could not imagine that the premiere of the restored film would be screened on a bed sheet hung up at an evacuation centre. Yet this is how the José Maceo Vocational School in…
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Screen Cuba Festival 2025 helps restore short films by Juan Padrón
Screen Cuban has done it again! The Festival has recently paid £6,700 to the Colombian Film Heritage Foundation as requested by the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), to support ICAIC’s project to restore many of its important classic films in its archive. Last year we donated £3000, enabling the restoration of two early cartoons about Elpidio…
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Music Fund for Cuba donates supplies for Cuban film makers
Boxes of much needed materials for the Cuban Film Institute are on their way to Havana. They have been donated by one of Screen Cuba’s sponsors, The Music Fund for Cuba. The charity responded to an appeal by ICAIC’s restoration archive team for specific items which are impossible to source in Cuba thanks to the…
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Film by Cuban children came to Britain
Several hundred children greeted the Cuban short Una Aventura de Elpido Valdés by Juan Padrón with plenty of laughs about its slapstick jokes and humorous escapades when it was screened at the Children’s International Film Festival @childrensfilmfestival in Kingston, UK in June. This 1974 animation about a popular anti-colonial hero, loved by Cuban children, was…
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Cuban Film Institute recognises Screen Cuba
Screen Cuba has received a special award from the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) and we are delighted to receive it. In presenting the award to Screen Cuba coordinators Trish Meehan and Dodie Weppler in recognition of the Festival’s success in the past two years, Cuban Ambassador Ismara Vargas Walter explained how the Festival played a…
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Screen Cuba wraps up for 2025 – “together we can do amazing things”
After screening another selection of incredible films from Cuba in London and beyond, the 2025 festival is over! We are delighted that we have had such positive feedback about the programme, and increased our audience by more than a third over last year in London alone. It once again confirms our view that UK audiences…
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Padrón book captures “the identity of an entire people”
This year Screen Cuba will give a special place to the work of Cuban director Juan Padrón (1947-2020), the island’s revered godfather of animation. Not only are we screening two of his first animations, we are welcoming his daughter Silvia Padrón, who is working to preserve his legacy, and we are also making available for…
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Screen Cuba 2025 festival trailer launched
Screen Cuba: Films to Change the World 16-29 March 2025 Festival of Cuban Cinema – London and beyond – trailer copyright Screen Cuba. Thanks to Roberto Perez Curbelo in Havana for original animation and Danko Rosete and Raulo Napoles for original music, to MatiStudio.co for footage editing.
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TUESDAY 18 MARCH Screen Cuba presents: Guantanamera + Elpidio Valdés
A satire on life in Cuba during the ‘Special Period’ of the early 1990s, as well as an absurd comedy road trip from one end of the island to the other by the master of Cuban cinema. Tuesday 18 March, 6.30pm Screen 1 at the ICA London BOOK TICKETS NOW Guantanamera | Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Juan Carlos Tabío |…
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SATURDAY 29 MARCH Screen Cuba presents: Accelerated Under-development: A Film in the Idiom of Santiago Álvarez + Hurricane + Cerro Pelado + Funeral of Benny Moré
A tribute to the revolutionary Cuban filmmaker Santiago Álvarez and his “urgent cinema” approach he developed, making hundreds of innovative newsreels and documentaries raising public consciousness from the early 1960s. Followed by three important early shorts by Alvarez. Introduced by Michael Chanan, filmmaker and writer, author of ‘Cuban Cinema’ (2003) and special guest from Cuba,…
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TUESDAY 25 MARCH Screen Cuba presents: Memories of Underdevelopment + For the First Time
This film by Alea, possibly Cuba’s greatest director, is the most internationally renowned work in the history of Cuban cinema. It explores the ambivalent thoughts of an anti-hero, privileged would-be writer Sergio as he faces a new uncertain life after his wife and family flee to the US between the Bay of Pigs invasion and…
SCREEN CUBA, 15-28 March 2026, LONDON & BEYOND 