The Padilla Affair

Havana, spring of 1971: The poet Heberto Padilla has just been released from prision and appears to the Cuban writers' union where he intones a "heartfelt self-criticism", declares himself a counterrevolutionary agent and accuses many of his colleagues present there of complicity, including his wife. A month earlier, his arrest on charges of threatening the security of the Cuban state mobilized the intellectual vanguard of the entire world, who addressed a letter to Fidel Castro demanding the freedom of the poet, whose only sin was to dissent through his poetic work. The writer's mea culpa, whose recording is shown to the public for the first time, marks the narrative line of a story with testimonies from Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Edwards and Fidel Castro appear.

Pavel Giroud, a Cuban filmmaker living in Madrid, directs 'The Padilla Affair'. He works as the screenwriter of the documental, that is a co-production between Spain and Cuba. Among other titles, he has worked on 'Manteca, Mondongo y Bacalao con pan', 'Esther Borja: Rapsodia de Cuba', 'Frank Emilio, Amor y Piano', 'The Silly Age', 'Conga Irreversible', 'Playing Lecuona', 'The Companion', 'A palo Limpio' and 'Polaris'.