Film director
Los Océanos Son Los Verdaderos Continentes
LOGLINE
In a small town in the Cuban countryside live Alex and Edith, a young couple, Milagros, an elderly lady, and Frank and Alain, two nine-year-old kids. The three storylines flow and touch, while the specter of a separation hovers on each one of them.
SINOPSYS
Alex and Edith, a young couple in their 30s, nurture a relationship made up of small gestures and
tenderness among the ruins of Cuban buildings. Milagros, an elderly retired woman, survives
selling peanut cones on the street and spends her days listening to the radio and reading out old
letters. Frank and Alain, two nine-year-old best friends, go to school and dream of emigrating to
the United States to become Major League Baseball players. In San Antonio De Los Baños, a town
in inland Cuba where time seems to stand still, three worlds flow and unfold. Over this
contemporary reality, together with the characters’ dreams and memories, hovers the constant
spectre of separation and its defining force in shaping Cuban lives and destinies.
“IN CUBA, STATIONS AND AIRPORTS ARE THE REAL CEMETERIES”
<< The first time I went to Cuba, I was eight years old.
As I approached customs, I remember witnessing a desperate and endless embrace - with deep sobs and tears - between a father and his daughter who evidently had found a way to leave the island and would never come back. It was a farewell, a separation, poignant and unjust yet at the same time terribly common in Cuban
society, which today is experiencing the most serious migration crisis in its history (almost 8% of the population has left the country in the last year and the flow is constantly growing).
Oceans Are the Real Continents owes its inspiration to this image, a moment that settled in my memory and eventually created a connection between Cuba today and my artistic quest. The film puts a focus on the theme of separation, described and addressed with three different
chronological perspectives (past, present, and future), synecdochically expressed by three main narrative lines (two children, a young couple, and an older woman), which alternate and subtly intermingle throughout the entire length of the work. >>
