Bloomfield College Hosts "Cuban Film at a Crossroads"

By: Alicia Cook     alicia_cook@bloomfield.edu

On Tuesday April 19, Bloomfield College hosted “Cuban Film at a Crossroads: A Discussion with Juan Antonio Garcia and Alex Halkin.”

The occasion was co-sponsored by the Humanities Division and Geographies of Experience and was held in the Library Screening Room.

The event discussed what the new opening between the US and Cuba can mean for Cuban film.

Veteran film Cuban critic Juan Antonio García Borrero and filmmaker Alexandra Halkin debated the issues surrounding this time of rapid transition and showed clips from two recent Cuban films.  

Juan Antonio García Borrero is an expert on Cuban cinema. He has won multiple awards for literary criticism and created the Cuban film blog, “Cine Cubano, la Pupila Insomne,” one of the most important forums for debate about audiovisual media in Cuba.

Alexandra Halkin is a documentary filmmaker and founder and director of the Americas Media Initiative. She founded the Chiapas Media Project in 1998, an award winning bi-national organization that has trained over 200 indigenous men and women in video production in southern Mexico. A Guggenheim Fellowship and Fulbright recipient, Alexandra has produced five documentary shorts in Mexico, many of them award winning. In 2010, she founded the Americas Media Initiative (AMI) a non-profit organization that works with Cuban filmmakers living in Cuba.

The College was elated to have both Halkin and Borrero on campus for the afternoon to help educate the campus community on our ever-changing global environment.