Oceans Are The Real Continents

“Freedom is the essence of life,” children in a Cuban classroom are told. The concept is a wide one that stretches far beyond the birds we’ll see flapping in a small cage on a balcony and one which echoes in many forms through Tommaso Santambrogio’s feature debut. Although this is lightly fictionalised, there appears to be a strong documentary underpinning to this measured and melancholic monochrome portrait of the country as observed through the lives of three generations of Cubanos living in San Antonio De Los Baños, with his actors all playing versions of themselves.

The oldest is Milagros (Milagros Llanes Martínez), whose husband lost his life as a “freedom fighter” in Angola. We hear his thoughts in letters she still reads in between tidying her house and selling cones of peanuts at the local theatre. Freedom, meanwhile, is a difficult subject for puppeteer Edith (Edith Ybarra Clara) and her actor boyfriend Alex (Alexander Diego). She is in the process of getting an Italian visa, while he is still wedded to his homeland.

For the young generation, represented here by nine-year-old pals Frank (Frank Ernesto Lam) and Alain (Alain Alain Alfonso González), it’s freedom of imagination that is to the fore, whether they’re pondering what they are going to do when they grow up, aside from play Major League baseball, or inventing stories about a car they’re playing in. Frank’s parents, too, are making plans that might limit his freedom to choose.

These three stories come and go through the course of the film, although the characters don’t know one another, we can see they occupy the same geographical spaces. And geography is almost as important to the director. Santambrogio often pulls back from the cast to give a sense of the spaces they’re occupying, with ambient sounds of the rain or birdsong coming to the fore. There’s a still photographic quality to the cinematography from Lorenzo Casadio Vannucci, with the studious, fixed framing matching the meter of the film and allowing time for us to appreciate the texture, not just of the lives of these characters but the spaces they inhabit, from cool tiles and lush countryside to crumbling walls.

We’re also invited to consider spaces that lie outside the frame, such as when Frank is on the balcony with those caged birds and his brother, playing with cars, while an entirely different domestic drama is playing out inside. What sounds like water in a dream is revealed to be something else entirely, while elsewhere, we watch Edith’s marionettes at work as they, through the very nature of being under control, offer her a freedom of emotional expression that resonates with the film’s themes of longing and displacement.

Santambrogio’s film, which opened Venice Film Festival's Venice Days, is not one of big narrative manouevres or dramatics but of the smaller ripples of emotion that ebb and flow through life with just as much impact.