Miami Film Festival presents audience the city and the world — and you don’t have to leave home | Opinion
Every year, the Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival programmers walk a curatorial high-wire. We quest for work that illuminates and expands the world as we Miamians perceive it; work that speaks to our dynamic community while maintaining high artistic standards.
For the 38th edition, which launches March 5 and runs until March 14 with daily screenings at Silverspot Cinemas downtown and from your sofa at home via virtual screenings, our programming crusade took on an even greater sense of purpose. With Miami still reeling from pandemic trauma, just producing this year’s Festival — instead of canceling or postponing it — felt vital in and of itself, providing Miamians with a sense of continuity and tradition, and a bridge to something we, at one time, could always take for granted.
The most difficult film to program every year is that for opening night. We can only choose one, and it sets the tone for the edition’s identity and how history will remember us. The pressure to get it right can be intense. We prayed that we would find a great Miami story for this crucial slot in 2021, and the universe blessed us with Edson Jean’s “Ludi,” which will have its world premiere on Friday.
In one sense, “Ludi” is a small film, shot in mere days with a budget of less than $50,000, with a small cast and few locations. In another, much more important, sense, “Ludi” is a huge film. It rose out of Miami’s sizable Haitian community and it redresses a community that has long been cinematically underrepresented. But there are even more layers of nuance to its selection as Miami Film Festival’s opening-night presentation.
“Ludi’s” Black title character is a recent Haitian immigrant; the film’s plot also turns, significantly, on two other characters — one a Cuban, the other a Jewish white man. This makes “Ludi” a story about Miami as it is now, with three of its largest communities continually circling each other, perpetually adjusting to co-existence, re-calibrating to avoid conflicts with each other, learning to share their roles in shaping the soul of our city. Best of all, “Ludi” is a wonderous entertainment — it has charm like a sparkle and is touching in a most universal way, reminding us to continue to adjusting our perspectives in times of personal duress.
Being seen is one of the most powerful things the movies can do for us. In Miami, generational conflict between Cuban-Americans often centers around the view of Cuban identity, and it affects all Miamians, Cuban or not. The first Cubans who fled here post-Revolution and have been a dominant force in Miami civic life ever since are now settling into their sunset years — meanwhile, many of their children and grandchildren have evolved their own diverse views on Cuba.
Lilo Vilaplana’s “Plantados” recounts the horrors of torture suffered by political prisoners in Castro’s prisons before their escape to Miami. It’s an epic, muscular production, a sweeping cri de coeur across those generations; the very potency and verve of its style feel like one final plea to younger Miamians to never forget the atrocities that Castro inflicted on so many. Manny Soto’s “A New Dawn” is quieter but no less emotional, and it, too, is a rallying cry for remembrance.
Jayme Kaye Gershen’s “Birthright” literally shows us Miami Cuban family dinner-table conversations from the next generation’s point of view. Two Miami-born Cuban musicians who make up the popular band Afrobeat are invited to play a concert in Havana during the short-lived Obama thaw, but must contend with some virulent objections from some members of their family. The pair goes forward with the trip and learn much about themselves from their generational musician counterparts living on the island. “Birthright” imagines the connection between young people as a path into the future for Miami. It’s a vision shared by Andy Señor Jr’.s “Revolution Rent.”
With a mass exodus from Venezuela re-shaping a new generation of Miami, Maria Corina Ramirez’s semi-autobiographical “Bridges” is a vital document — the story of a DREAMer grappling with the adjustments to American, specifically 305, life. The documentary “Sweet Soul” is indescribably moving, as it honors our Black elders. Isaac Mead-Long’s science-fiction “Pallavi” considers our environmental future. Our sprawling, complex city can never be fully represented in just one season, or even one article. But the annual joy of Miami Film Festival is the ability to stop for a beat and take in a mosaic of Miami’s stories on screen vis-à-vis those from the rest of the globe. It helps us understand how we are fitting into the world.
Pride in Miami is the always our focus, but, especially in 2021, with Miami’s world-famous primary area code 305 sheathed in traditional film festival laurels. The message is that 305 is always a winner, 305 is shining strong in the spotlight.
To see this year’s films is to give faith that our fortitude is still here.
Jaie Laplante is executive director of Miami Film Festival.
Go to miamifilmfestival.com for more information.
