Driving around the streets of Cuba, Lav Diaz – the famous Filipino director – and Gustavo Flecha - a talkative Cuban taxi driver – find themselves discussing about politics, migration, social conditions and love; touching many personal stories and experiences, they create an historical affresco of the conditions of their own countries.
Year of production 2023 Length 50' Country Italy Shooting Format 2K/Super 8 Aspect Ratio 1.85:1 Dialogue Spanish, English Director Tommaso Santambrogio Production Rosso Film, Chiotto Production Producers Ivan Casagrande Conti, Marco Malfi Chindemi, Tommaso Santambrogio Executive Producer Ivan Casagrande Conti Cuban Executive Producer Matteo Faccenda, Coralmente Film Screenwriter Tommaso Santambrogio Cinematographer Lorenzo Casadio Vannucci, Tommaso Santambrogio Editor Matteo Faccenda Sound Design Tommaso Barbaro Set Designer Edel Figueredo Costume Designer and Make Up Anisleidys Boza First Assistant Director Giselle García Castro Cast Lav Díaz, Gustavo Fleita, Mario Limonta, Mayra Mazorra, Armando Omar Pérez Pedroso
Director's Statement Taxibol is a reflection and at the same time a summa of all these questions and many others. The spark that caused them came in 2019, when I met two people fundamental to me on a human and artistic level: Gustavo Flecha - an expansive Cuban taxi driver - and Lav Diaz - the famous Filipino director. The first part of the film is the result if this strange meeting; Lav and Gustavo guided by me talked and jumped spontaneously from their historical and emotional background to the one of their countries, from their love-relational difficulties to their socio-political commitment towards two post-colonial countries affected by terribles deviations and distortions - Cuba and the Philippines. Through their individual experiences I had the chance to give a further and peculiar look at two countries where justice has always struggled to find space; as a consequence, in the second part of the film I chose to analyse and to observe this space, to dissect this unheard cry of justice which is gradually becoming more and more deafening. The silent observation of the daily repetition and reiteration of the evil, embodied in the figure of the former Filipino general Juan Mijares Cruz (a man close to Marcos and his bloody government exiled in Cuba after the end of his legacy), was the result. In the movie, the former general - wanted by Gustavo Flecha and Lav Diaz - lives in a farm where still subtly exerts a power and a constant violence, echo of what he committed in the Philippines’ archipelago in the 1980s. The guilt, the relationship between individual subjectivity and historical objectivity and how to deal with the absurdity and banality of the evil were the themes that I ended up dealing with in this second part, where I suddenly realised that the only possible reaction to the roots of the human inner cruelty could be the image and the memory, therefore cinema. To conclude, the ambition of Taxibol is not only to make people remember what historically happened through images and a narrative construction, but to open to a reflection and a dialogue on how the individual and therefore intrinsically the human being can be analysed and narrated treating a collective historical memory and its traumas.
