For more than three decades, Sorelio Hernández, known as Pucho, filmed everyday life in Bejucal and his travels with the folkloric group Tambores de Bejucal, creating an unintentional archive where neighbours, carnivals, and rituals coexist without hierarchy.

Similarly, from the early 1980s, Miguel Secades and the Cine Club Cubanacán systematically documented traditional celebrations in central Cuba, including the Cruz de Mayo, the Parrandas of Remedios and Camajuaní, and family-preserved rituals.

In Bejucal, Pucho also gave film to photographer Felipe Rouco to record the pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of San Lázaro. Fragmentary and often silent, these images endure as open records of time, where local festivities and religious practices acquire a broader, universal resonance.

The images gathered in this programme stand apart both from radical experimental impulses and from militant cinema intended to mobilise the masses. Instead, what emerges are modest yet persistent records: films born from an attention to the nearby, to everyday gestures, and to the celebrations of seemingly small towns shaped by larger collective histories.

Pucho, Operación Tributo, Dir. Sorelio “Pucho” Hernández (20 minutes)
Within a single roll of film, images of the funeral held in Bejucal to honour combatants killed in the Angolan War intertwine with celebrations of Las Charangas, the town’s most important festivity. Life and mourning coexist within the same flow of images.

San Lázaro – Rushes, Dir. Felipe Rouco  (27 minutes)
Record of the pilgrimage to the sanctuary of San Lázaro on December 17, 1994, during one of the deepest moments of economic and social crisis in the country.

Una tradición centenaria (A Century-Old Tradition), Dir. Miguel Secades (13 minutes)
Footage filmed over more than two decades by Miguel Secades and the Cine Club Cubanacán, documenting the persistence of this traditional celebration and its communal rituals in rural towns of central Cuba.

Las Parrandas Remedianas, Dir. Miguel Secades (7 minutes)

Record of the construction of the plaza structures for the Parrandas of Remedios, one of the most important popular celebrations in the country, alongside the Charangas of Bejucal and the carnivals of Santiago de Cuba.

 

The screening is accompanied by live readings, recorded music performed by the Tambores de Bejucal, and a recorded interpretation of the song Babalú Ayé by Juan Barona Acosta, a playwright and amateur lyrical singer from Bejucal.

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