Giraffes

A rare independent film from Cuba, this charming and tender portrait of female friendship follows three hair-salon employees as they hit the town looking for excitement in those parts of Havana that tourists rarely see.

Havana, December 2014. A director is looking for a leading actress to play Stella in a Cuban adaptation of “A Streetcar Named Desire” when the announcement that Cuba and the United States are restoring diplomatic relations irrupts into the ordinarily weightless everyday lives of a group of actors getting ready for the casting.

A filmmaker locks himself in his house to face up to his loneliness and the ghosts of three couples, the protagonists of three of the films he made over 31 years, from the fall of the Berlin Wall until today. An essay on loneliness, absence, unease and the weight of social circumstances on individuals. A film about Havana, as lived and filmed under a blazing sun.

Cuban filmmaker Enrique "Kiki" Álvarez's newest feature paints a slow-burning love story set in the years immediately following the Cuban Revolution in January of 1959. The Black Box is a secret diary written by Elsa and read by her granddaughter several decades later, a film about a young woman who finds and reads the experiential, emotional and political legacy that her grandmother has left hidden like a magical object. Featuring rare footage from the beginning of the Cuban Revolution.