2020-2021
Apuntes para una película sobre el destierro

SYNOPSIS

Director Carlos Quintela and actor Raúl Capote, two Cubans living in Madrid and Seville respectively, want to make a fictional feature film about the eight years of exile to which Cuban health professionals who leave official missions are sentenced. Quintela writes a draft of the synopsis of the film that he shares online with Capote, who would be the main actor.

The story is about a young Cuban doctor, who in exchange for enlisting in an official mission agrees to disown a former classmate. Having achieved his goal, he arrives in East Timor where he works as a neurologist. As the months go by, the doctor begins to be increasingly dissatisfied with the working conditions imposed by the mission chief: the surveillance to which he is subjected, the constant pressure to alter medical statistics, and learning that he only receives the 20% of his salary.

He drops out. Aware that this decision will earn him eight years of exile, he hatches a plan to escape to the United States. He then embarks on a long odyssey that begins in Indonesia and that, nine borders later, should lead him to his destination. However, he is lost in the jungle of the Darién Gap and presumed dead until one day, in a rehabilitation clinic, the doctor wakes up from a coma in which he had been immersed for the last eight years.

FICHA DEL DIRECTOR

Carlos Quintela.
(Havana, 1984)

Carlos Quintela is a director, producer, screenwriter and creative consultant. He studied visual arts at 23 y C, Accounting at the Antonio Guiteras Polytechnic, Audiovisual Communication at the Higher Institute of Art and Screenwriting at the EICTV International Film School in San Antonio de Los Baños. His debut feature, La piscina, premiered in the Panorama section of the 63rd Berlinale and was recognized with more than ten awards at festivals around the world, including the Special Jury Prize at the Marrakech International Film Festival (2012) by Martin Scorsese, President of the Festival Jury. His second feature film La obra del siglo won more than fifteen awards, including the Lions Film Award and the Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Festival in 2015, two of the most prestigious awards in Dutch Cinema; the Cuban Critics Association selected it as one of the best films of the 2010-2019 decade. It was also chosen by Tropical magazine, based in New York, among the 100 best Latin American films of the last decade.

His films have been screened at Le Center Pompidou (Paris), Pérez Art Museum Miami, Museum of the Moving Image (New York) and at festivals such as Berlin, Rotterdam, Venice, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Minsk, Moscow, and Havana. Her third feature film, Los lobos del este (2017), starred Tatsuya Fuji, and was co-produced with Naomi Kawase and released theatrically in Japan. Parallel to his activity as a producer and director, Quintela has also co-written several short films, documentaries, and feature films with directors from the United Kingdom, Germany, Argentina, including the feature film Candelaria, directed by Colombian Jhonny Hendrix, awarded at Venice (2017) and also by the Colombian Academy of Cinematographic Arts in the category of Best Screenplay at the Macondo Awards (2018). In addition, he has obtained the Coral for Best Unpublished Screenplay for Ismael at the 34th International Film Festival of Havana. In December 2019, together with Heidi Hassan, Patricia Pérez, Sergio Fernández and Yimit Ramírez, he founded Free Hundred Media, a Madrid-based production company open to myriad 21st century formats.