“Neither a traitor nor a martyr,” a phrase that came to define the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, could also be applied to The Padilla Affair, a timely documentary written and directed by Cuban filmmaker Pavel Giroud. It was in the spring of 1971 that the poet, recently released from jail after being charged with attacking the security of the Cuban state in his poetic work, delivered an infamous mea culpa in feverish, cascading words that shocked and divided the literary world and marked a turning point in the Cuban revolution’s history.
The film has been enjoying festival screenings around the world since its bows in Telluride and San Sebastian, including a win at the Miami Film Festival where it picked up the best documentary award, and most recently the best documentary nod at the 2023 Platino Ibero-American Film Awards. It deserves a wider audience.
Filmmaker Pavel Giroud (El Acompañante/The Companion, 2015) now lives in Madrid, joining the steady flow of Cuban exiles around the world. His film captures an era where a single poem could threaten a revolution and awaken public opinion. Centered around Padilla’s three-hour “confession” in front of his fellow writers at the guild’s headquarters, the documentary distills the most dramatic moments and contextualizes them for present-day viewers, ending the film with recent images of artists protesting in the streets of Havana.
Watching the rediscovered footage of Padilla’s self-denouncement, it appears so fierce and unforgiving that one suspects it was a smart performance delivered in that sardonic way to ultimately undermine his confession. That suspicion must have been shared by Fidel Castro, who commanded the footage remain hidden. The fact it has finally been unearthed and made public is another sign of an aging revolution unraveling.
As it split the literary world in two, the confession left two future Latin American Nobel prize winners sitting on opposite sides of the fence: the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez defended Fidel Castro’s revolution, while the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa rallied colleagues to denounce Cuba’s human rights abuses. Many prominent writers joined his J’accuse cause, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, and Susan Sontag, all denouncing Castro’s repression.
The footage is mostly in stark black and white and close-ups that convey the asphyxiating atmosphere of the room where Padilla delivered his operatic expiation. The mournful, knowing faces in the audience add a mute, Brechtian commentary to the proceedings. They also become a metaphor for Cuba’s inability to break free of its rigid loyalty rules. In addition to the secret recording, Giroud has painstakingly gathered archival film from over 22 different sources worldwide to piece together this searing, definitive chronicle of the poet’s political suicide.
The editing helps hold the viewers’ attention and keeps the narrative fluid by inserting interviews and images of those passionate times, including a sample of Fidel Castro’s speeches, defining the role of the writer as “firmly within the revolution, never outside.” It will be best enjoyed by Spanish speakers, though the film’s accurate subtitles help others keep up with Padilla’s prodigious, self-destructive verbosity. When his poems are quoted, they reveal his very different command of the language, crisp and ironic and closer to the brevity and depth of a haiku. As he wrote in his Fuera del Juego (Sent Off the Field) collection in 1968: …“un paso al frente, y/dos o tres atrás:/pero siempre aplaudiendo.” (“…one step forward, two or three steps back, but always applauding.”)
In The Padilla Affair, the poet appears irrepressible, sweating profusely and calling himself a traitor and a counter-revolutionary. Padilla denounces his friends and even his own wife (Belkis Cuza Malé, a poet in her own right) and demands they too repent. It has long been debated whether Padilla’s long rant was spontaneous or a grotesque form of collaboration. Now Giroud is facing some outlandish accusations, with some inside Cuba wondering how he came into possession of video footage banned and hidden for so long.
Regardless of its origin, the spoken words carry a force that earlier leaked transcripts and reports could not convey. Giroud has reopened a wound that had not fully healed over those fifty years. By exposing the painful session of repentance that took place half a century ago, and linking it to recent protests by artists inside Cuba, Giroud makes an urgent plea for freedom of thought and expression. Padilla was finally able to leave Cuba in 1980 and died in exile. This film brings him back to life, and his poems still ring true, as Cuba expels other artists, and a new war rattles the world.
Director, screenplay, editing: Pavel Giroud
Producers: Lía Rodriguez, Alejandro Hernandez
Archival Research: Ana Blazquez
Editing Consultant: Fernando Epstein
Music: Pablo Cervantes
Sound editing, sound mix: Vanessa Carvajal, Anto Molina
Production company: Ventú Productions
World sales: FiGa Film Sales
In Spanish, French, and English
78 minutes
