Fidel
2016 · 5m · España
Directed by Eduardo Casanova
Genres: drama, historical, satire
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
The Cuba everyone knows is dying, and while a thousand capitalist brands enter the country, Fidel, leader of the Revolution, finds himself alone, locked in a room.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Casanova traps the revolution's icon in a room while the world moves on without him—it's a premise so perfectly backwards, so gleefully willing to find pathos in obsolescence, that it makes every other Castro film look like a museum piece. This is the kind of subversive premise that makes you uncomfortable because it's *working*.
The film operates within a strict formal constraint—Fidel alone, confined—that recalls the theatrical tradition of the chamber piece, yet Casanova uses the medium's specificity (editing, ambient sound, the weight of time in cinema) to transform confinement into historical elegy. It's a work aware of its own formal genealogy.
The decision to keep Fidel almost entirely still, letting the external sound design of a modernizing Havana do all the narrative work, transforms what could've been ponderous into something genuinely aching—one compositional choice that makes the whole melancholy land.