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One of the most important debut films of the year inaugurated the Giornate degli Autori at the Venice Film Festival: “The oceans are the true continents” is a debut to remember, the perfect opening of one of the side sections of the lagoon event.
Directed by Tommaso Santambrogio, an Italian born in 1991, who chose to expand the narrative of one of his short films of the same name from 2019. That short film was produced and set to music by Lav Diaz, a great Filipino author who seems like a sort of putative father of this feature film as well.
Set in Cuba, “The oceans are the real continents” tells the story of characters who live in an inland village where it seems that time has stopped: from two young actors who live a passionate relationship among the ruins of the surrounding buildings to children who dream of emigrating to the United States to become professional baseball players, up to an elderly woman who spends her days listening to the radio and re-reading old letters from the past.
In a fresco that comes to life through the memory of the characters, however, the specter of separation hovers, the real great scourge of contemporary Cuban society, effectively represented right from the evocative and symbolic incipit of the film.
A nation in constant expectation
Santambrogio has chosen several narrative lines to give life to an overview of a place and a nation that seems to be in constant expectation, creating a stratified and ambitious product.
The origin of the film
In its own way it is also a film with a political slant “The oceans are the real continents”, a sociological reflection on Cuba that comes from a childhood experience lived by the director. He himself tells it in these words: «The first time I went to Cuba I was eight years old. I remember that as I approached the airport controls, I witnessed a desperate and inseparable embrace – with deep sobs and tears – between a father and a daughter, who evidently had found a way to leave the island never to return. . It was a farewell, a poignant and unjust as terribly daily and common separation in Cuban society, which today is going through the most serious migration crisis in its history. “Los océanos son los verdaderos continents” owes its origin to this image».