19 minutes / Color
Spanish; Russian / English subtitles
Release: 2024
Copyright: 2021
A group of old friends reunite at a summer house in Varadero, Cuba. Their last meeting was in Minsk, mid-1980s: they were preparing to return home to Cuba after five years spent studying Marxist-Leninist philosophy in the Soviet Union.
The meeting triggers a flood of old memories and historical reminiscences. Drawn to the Soviet Union by an idealistic commitment to utopian socialism, the young students were disoriented by what they encountered: a society moving inexorably towards its own disintegration. This was the era of perestroika, when new reforms rapidly transformed Soviet society and undermined the old certainties of official ideology. What once appeared as a shining beacon of the future looked increasingly like an historical artifact destined to disappear.
Sitting around the table, reminiscing, and looking through old slides, the friends register the weight of history in their memories and conflicted emotions. LOS PUROS is a meditation on a vanished political world and its continued reverberations into the present day.
Select Accolades
Between 1975 and 1991, Cuba sent more than 400,000 soldiers and civilians to Angola to support of the country's left-wing government. Two thousand of them never returned.
Carla Valdes Leon | 2017 | 45 minutes | Color | English; Spanish | English subtitles
Unveils the complexities of a Cuban society frequently misrepresented by the media.
María Isabel Alfonso, Ph.D. | 2019 | 37 minutes | Color | Spanish | English subtitles
In 1986, 600 orphans and rural children from Burkina-Faso were sent to Cuba with the mission of learning a trade so they could come back and develop their country, which was undergoing a Revolution. But after the assassination in 1987 of the country's president and the end of the Cold War, how were they to return?
Géraldine Berger | 2022 | 84 minutes | Color | French; Spanish; Lyélé | English subtitles
