New Movie in Havana!

UNDERDOG 

Movie by

Gian Luigi Biagini: concept, direction, performance, text writer, voice.

Nathan Hendrickson: camera, co-editing.

December 2022

ABSTRACT

The movie was recorded in Old Havana's streets (dogs) and Havana's TV building (vultures). It is an artistic movie made by walking in the streets of the city with a living plot that has emerged in becoming. It intertwines anthropological, mystic and political dimensions. It poetically and dramatically documents the entanglement between vultures, street dogs and poor street people in Havana. Here the boundaries between humans, animals and syncretic religious cult of the streets fade in a fluid animist situation; as it is shown by "humanimal" entangled traces on the concrete and by the encounters with the Saint of street-dogs ( Lazarus The Beggar). The animals become metaphors, but also actual network-agencies, of a predator-prey trap-assemblage where humans and different animals are caught in the tension between advanced global capitalism and a paranoid communist regime of top-down control. Cuba is crushed between the embargo and an autarchic communist regime; it can only import inflation from the global economy, while it can't import financial capital for development and export. Everything is slowly crumbling down while inflation rises up and the striving to survive becomes hard. Inflation also engenders an unjust class division between the few who can work with tourism (euros and dollars) and the others.The dignity of most Cuban people is still wonderful. Cubans have still not been atomised in "selfish comfort zones" by post-modern techno-capitalism as it happens in the rest of the cold open Globe. However, poverty, scarcity of goods and decadence is hunting and haunting their coloured and sensuous vital happiness. Images, noises and voices are edited to create a dark mystic-thriller to express symbolically and phenomenologically this site-specific paranoia and schizophrenia. However, the video-performance is open to multilayered resonances of sensations. It wants to be a more-than-representational deep-map that captures the geopoetic of the living space of the performance that cuts through living affections of any kind.

Gian Luigi Biagini

The movie will be presented in Arthaus Havana and in University of Liege Human-Animal Exhibition.

Look the video on VIMEO

https://vimeo.com/783389594/4cd9db0367