The Padilla caseby Cuban Pavel Giroud, was shortlisted for the Oscars in the category of best documentary feature film.
The work, which delves into one of the darkest episodes of the Cuban regime in the early 1970s, appears in the list of 167 feature-length documentaries that academics will submit to analysis with a view to choosing 15 semi-finalists, from which the five nominees will then emerge.
The news was announced by the Cuban filmmaker himself on his networks, where dozens of the director’s followers – many of them artists – congratulated Giroud and stated that being on that list is an immense achievement for a documentary production that has already received other awards. .
In April, The Padilla case won the 2023 Platinum Ibero-American Film Award in the Best Documentary Film category.
“It is the story of a poet who was taken to prison in 1971 because of his rebellious work and then was forced to publicly recant,” said Giroud at the reception of the Platinum Award at the IFEMA Municipal Palace in Madrid.
“The worst thing about that is that more than half a century later the same thing continues to happen in my country”added the director at the award ceremony.
“That is why I, and all those who voted for our film, want to thank you on behalf of all Cubans who are tired of our country being a theme park of an ideology or a utopia and that the pain of Cubans is not have the same pain as other nations that have suffered,” he concluded then.
The work reveals fragments of the original recordings of the famous self-incrimination of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, hidden in Cuba for more than 50 years.
It is built exclusively with archival images and sounds – interviews, testimonies, letters, photographs and audios – but it has a special connotation for having worked with the almost four self-incriminating hours in which the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla (1932-2000) immolated himself. publicly on the night of April 27, 1971.
The Padilla Case is the fifth feature film – fourth solo – by the Cuban filmmaker based in Spain. The proposal shows notable differences with his previous work: The age of the peseta (2006), The companion (2015), and the musical documentary Betancort Playing Lecuona (2015), which he co-directed with Juan Manuel Villar.
In its arduous race towards the Oscar award, Pavel Giroud’s documentary will have to compete with titles such as American Symphony, 20 Days in Mariupol, Still: A Michael J. Fox Film, The Eternal Memory, Four Daughters, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project and Kokomo City, among others.
