A film shot in Cuba. Not an anthropological film, nor a narrative documentary or a film essay, but certainly a film concerned with foreignness and difference. Mostly filmed in the hilly communes of Yateras, searching for long disappeared clandestine settlements, so-called palenque, where African slaves, Taínos and Chinese forced laborers freed themselves from colonial violence. The film narrates a sense of place, which feels real and imaginary at the same time. It asks whether it is possible to communicate something of the soul of a place, steeped in histories of revolution and dissidence, without relying on didacticism or storytelling, without taking recourse on hierarchical distinctions between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the macro and the micro, the animate and the inanimate.
