It is near impossible to talk about Cuba without rousing some controversy, especially as a young American with no Cuban roots of my own.

Some people speak of Cuba as if it is so black and white.

You're either pro Castro or anti Cuba, pro Cuban or anti-American.

In reality, it is so much more complicated than this.

Cuba is one of the most complex, confusing, exciting and multi-layered places I have ever visited, and its history reads like an unbelievable movie script.

This little island has been mythologized and re-mythologized through every angle for over four centuries, which is perhaps part of its allure.

The story of Cuba has been written and rewritten over time by its own leaders, by foreign instigators, by the United States government, by Hollywood, by tourism, and to some degree by its own people.

So how do we read these myths into the realities of today's Cuba?

♪ “Steadee█s Groove” ♪ Hi, I'm Stephanie.

I'm a 33-year-old American filmmaker, and a complete cinema nerd.

I love the oldies, the goodies.

The New Waves or Golden Age, you name it, I'm in.

On my 33rd birthday, I decided to travel the world to meet and document other filmmakers my age.

Travel with me to over 33 countries to meet the storytellers who are dynamically challenging the status quo of the world today.

Together, we will watch their films, hear their stories, engage with their cultures, and perhaps, learn a little bit about life, love, cinema, history, and me!

Cuba, the largest island in the Caribbean, spans 777 miles, home to a population of over 11 million.

An archipelago of around 1600 islands, islets and keys.

Cuba's history in the past 400 years has revolved around the act of resistance.

While the island is believed to have been inhabited since 4000 BCE, the original native population was practically wiped out after the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492.

Hatuey, a Taino chief, became Cuba's first symbol of resistance when he refused to convert to Christianity and attempted to resist the Spanish conquistadors.

He was burnt at the stake, but his legend lives on, and there's even a Cuban beer named after him.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Cubans came to fight two wars of independence before the famed revolution of 1959.

Gathering more heroes of resistance and martyrs to mythologize along the way.

Our filmmaker is Daiyan Noa, a 36-year-old Cubano born and bred in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana.

After two attempts, Daiyan was accepted into a highly competitive film school, Instituto Superior de Arte, where he entered as a sound designer, while his true ambition was to become a film director.

Fidel Castro was a master of mythology and used the powers of an image and soundbite to incredible success, which allowed him to win a resistance against all odds and maintain singular power for over 60 years.

And one of his most powerful weapons of all was filmmaking.

Daiyan's, perhaps among the very first generation of truly independent filmmakers in Cuba.

One could even argue that being an independent filmmaker in Cuba is an act of resistance.

My first trip to Cuba was in November 2014, exactly one month before the Cuban thaw, or so-called normalization between the United States and Cuba.

Fidel Castro was still alive.

What struck me most were the giant billboards that dominated the streets.

Socialism or Death.

Homeland or death.

Still, I was seduced by the timewarp feel the island, the salsa classes and percussion lessons I took.

But something bothered me.

Where does a foreign visitor discover the “real” Cuba?

I met a young man named Leo, a tattoo artist who I see as a modern day embodiment of resistance.

The fact that Leo quit his government sponsored T-shirt factory job to open up his own underground tattoo parlor.

It's a step towards personal freedom.

Running a tattoo business allowed Leo to set his own hours, set his own prices, live by his own rules, on his own terms, no matter how difficult.

Visiting Cuba and meeting Leo changed me in several ways.

I can't even say I fully understand it.

It left me questioning things such as equality and justice, the fairness of sheer luck to being born into a certain country or circumstance versus another, the value of a passport that I had never fully considered before.

It took years to process all this.

Perhaps I still am.

How do I know your name really is Abigail?

Huh?

Would it matter?

Of course it matters.

Who are you really?

And so I did what writers and artists do.

I channeled these thoughts, questions, and emotions into a short film.

I wrote, directed, and produced, “Para Todo Mal Para Todo Bien A Mezcal Trilogy.

” Americans, we like what we can't have.

Sexy men and women, mojitos, dance parties on the Malecon.

And to you, this is Cuba?

All I think about is finding a way out of here.

Now I'm back in Cuba.

This time I am here on an official visa rather than the sneaky way I traveled as an American pre-thaw Fidel has passed on, and Raul is no longer president.

To see what the current generation of creative artists are up to in today's Cuba, I visited Havana's hottest attraction, Fabrica de Arte Cubano.

For 2 CUC, you can hobnob with local creatives at this former cooking oil factory turned all in one gallery space, concert venue, cinema and nightclub.

FAC was the brainchild of popular Cuban musician Alfonso X.

Opened in 2014.

I chatted with filmmaker Inti Herrera, FAC█s head film programmer and part of the team who worked with Alfonso X to open this innovative space.

One of Fidel's first acts in power was to form the Cuban Cinema Institute or ICAIC, as it is commonly known.

Fidel saw the power of the cinematic language to sway the Cuban population towards his revolutionary ideals.

ICAIC oversees all aspects of filmmaking from writing, directing, production, and distribution.

Before the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Cuba was a movie going population.

There were over 600 cinemas across the country.

That's more than were in New York or Paris.

But at the time of my visit, only 19 remained operational.

This is largely due to the fact that after the Revolution and Batista's defeat, many of the cinema owners fled the country.

As a result, the Cuban government simply could not upkeep on their own all of the 600 movie theaters.

What compels me most about Cuban cinema is the blend of fiction and documentary, a trend since the revolutionaries started making films.

Post-revolutionary cinema had several goals: to share the history of Cuba from the revolutionary filmmakers█ point of view, and to provide an ideal example for everyday Cubans to live by.

Many of these films posed queries that forced the viewer to question themselves as revolutionaries, but these filmmakers were not just passing along a message for their government.

They were exceptionally creative individuals who had a desire to create a cinematic art form, one that differed both from Hollywood studio films and that of the European arthouse movement.

The Cubans aimed to create their own distinctly Cuban aesthetic style of filmmaking.

They strive to integrate real life into their visual storytelling, to reclaim their history through the films that they produced.

[ Speaks in Spanish ] Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's 1968 film “Memories of Underdevelopment” is a movie as complicated as Cuba itself.

The protagonist, Sergio, is constantly questioning the world around him, trying to figure out what a post-revolutionary Cuba means for a rich bourgeois guy who previously had been handed everything.

Though Sergio may not seem like an obvious revolutionary, perhaps the fact that he chooses to stay in Cuba while the rest of his Batista supporting friends and family have left for Miami, make his actions all the more revolutionary.

Today, this film could be easily mistaken for an anti-revolutionary one, but it was fully supported by ICAIC and approved by the government.

Alea insists that it was a pro revolutionary film, which he hoped would spark feelings in the viewer to question themselves and the world they live in.

█ In keeping up with the tradition of Cuban filmmakers, Daiyan is especially interested in the blend of documentary and fiction.

His feature length documentary “adoleCe” is a prime example of this.

What I love about Daiyan's film is how intimately it gives us a portrait into the average Cuban█s home life and educational goals.

It is a story of dashed dreams and aspirations that we all can relate to.

And it feels very real.

To me, it does not have such a mythologized view of Cuba that so many other films about Cuba have.

Or maybe Daiyan is recreating the mythology in his own style.

Daiyan is creating his own identity through his filmmaking, rich in history, reflecting a Cuba in transition from post Fidel to post Raul to today.

The United States is considered the great frenemy of Cuba.

Tensions are high and have been for over 100 years.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, sugar cane was king.

With the forced importation of hundreds of thousands of African slaves.

Cuba became the largest slave colony in all of the Americas, with twice as many African slaves than in the United States.

Slavery has had a lasting impact on the population of the island, and was not abolished in Cuba until 1886.

In the late 1800s and early 20th century, the U.S. maintained business interest on the island, especially within the sugar industry, and the powers that be saw Cuba as a prime location To look over their interest in Central America, mainly the Panama Canal.

The United States had initially tried to buy Cuba from Spain, but Spain flat out refused.

Cuba was the last remaining Spanish colony, and Spain was going to hold on to Cuba with all its might.

On February 15th, 1898, the US Navy battleship Maine inexplicably blew up, and the United States government used this as an excuse to enter Cuba█s Second War of Independence.

Fighting with the Cubans against Spain.

Some of the earliest documentary film footage ever taken in the history of cinema was Thomas Edison's footage of the Spanish-American War in Cuba.

With the help of U.S. forces, Cuba beat Spain, and in 1902, the Cubans finally gained their independence.

The first part of Humberto Solas's seminal film “Lucia”, takes place during this war of independence.

It didn't take long before the Cubans began to question whether their independence from Spain was just trading one colonial power for another, as the U.S. maintained a tight control over the island.

Part 2 of “Lucia”, my favorite part of Solas' trilogy delves into the revolutionary fervor that was brewing in the 1930s.

After three decades of, “independence” proved unsatisfactory.

If Cuban films are playing to reality of their dark past and uncertain future, then Hollywood films about Cuba are doing the opposite, further mythologizing Cuba by creating a fantasy version of the island which emphasizes an exotic other element to Cuba.

But it's films like these that draw adventurous tourists to travel to Cuba, perhaps coming in with misguided notions.

From the 1960s until recently, the American government made it illegal to shoot a film in Cuba, and so many of the Hollywood depictions were filmed either in neighboring Dominican Republic, such as Sydney Pollack█s, “Havana”, or on a Hollywood studio soundstage.

While in Cuba, I visited the Hotel Nacional, which features prominently in “Havana”, as well as in Francis Ford Coppola's Modern masterpiece “The Godfather Part II.” The Cuban scenes in “The Godfather” depict the real life 1946 Havana Conference, a meeting of the Mafia that was held in Havana at the Hotel Nacional under the guise of a Frank Sinatra concert, with full support from the Batista government.

To my delight, the Hotel Nacional has a cafe devoted to cinema in the basement.

One of the most mythologized figures in all of Cuba, isn't even Cuban.

I'm guessing you know who I'm talking about.

Che Guevara, the Argentinian revolutionary Steven Soderbergh's epic two part film “Che”, inspired me to trek over to the Plaza de la Revolución, Cuba's Independence Square.

An utterly depressing symbol of the victories of the revolution.

When the Soviet Union fell in 1989, ICAIC and Cuban cinema took a big hit.

There was no more funding for film production, and a filmmaker was lucky if they could even get their hands on a roll of film.

As a result, the country's filmmakers were forced to seek foreign financing or leave the country.

Because of this, for the first time in 50 years, films are being made more for a foreign audience than a Cuban one.

As a result, the films of the 1990s, the few that were able to get made anyway, tended to be focused on more controversial issues, such as the theme of homosexuality in the Oscar nominated flick “Fresa y Chocolate”.

2019 was the first time since 1959 that Cuba had a president who did not fight in the Cuban Revolution.

In fact, he wasn't even born yet.

Now there are AirBnbs and coffee shops, bars and boutiques.

Much of the charm remains, however, largely due to that trapped in time element which continues to lure in foreign visitors.

Have things changed in the few years since the opening with America?

Well, ICAIC has often been a friend of Cuban filmmakers, as history evolved, government oversight and censorship became a bigger and bigger reality for the filmmakers.

With the passage of Decree 349, a law passed in 2019 by Cuba's President Miguel Díaz-Canel, censorship and control of the narrative has reached even beyond ICAIC's purview.

Decree 349 essentially says that businesses or individuals who hire an artist without prior approval by the Ministry of Culture can be sanctioned.

The decree gives the government the right to suspend performances and confiscate materials that they deem to be against the government, and many artists have been detained.

Laws like this do not bode well for the future of independent cinema in Cuba.

Where do you see the future of cinema in Cuba going from here?

Do you see any type of change happening from here on out?

So how does a Cuban creative such as Daiyan forge a path as an independent filmmaker, in a country that is teetering between post revolution and post Castro change?

And what does it mean to be an independent filmmaker in a country that controls every aspect of the industry?

Though I only had a limited time to spend with Daiyan, I felt a kindred spirit with him.

I love hearing about his creative process and appreciate the grit he has to have for the near impossible task of being an independent filmmaker in Cuba.

And he makes it look easy.

With the power of words and a camera in hand, Daiyan just might be the catalyst that this generation needs to continue the fight forward towards true independence.

To learn more about the Cinema Nomad filmmakers and dive deeper into the exciting world of global cinema, visit our website.

CinemaNomad.TV