Epicentro is a multi-faceted essayistic encounter with the Caribbean island of Cuba. The filmmaker explores the historical background to the many connotations surrounding power and longing here, a story which proceeds in a spiral of liberation and conquest. A dynamic which is driven in no small part by the powerful medium of cinema itself.
“My aim was to pursue a subject of the imperialist narrative. How do empires expand, and above all, how do they explain this to themselves? I was particularly interested in the question of how the American Empire came into being in the first place. I discovered that the process was not primarily based on military power but on soft power. The first successful step here was the Spanish-American War, in the course of which the USA drove away the last European colonial powers from the Caribbean and the Pacific. But then suddenly new technology emerged which functioned on the level of mass hypnosis: the cinema. It was interesting to discover that the medium I myself work in was one of the main factors which allowed the Western Empire to develop, and that this soft power has contributed to maintaining the existence of this Empire for over a hundred years. That’s how I became interested in Cuba as a place where so many threads come together: Havana as the epicentre of slave trade, the first colonial masters in America, and the first cosmopolitan city on the planet, where native Americans, Europeans and Africans lived side by side.” (Hubert Sauper)
16 March 2023 after the screening of the movie Epicentro:
Kisangani Diary
after the screening of the movie
By Hubert Sauper
Austria, France, 1998; 43' DCP
Sales: Geyrhalter Films
The last days of Zaire: A film about people on the run. Along an old railway track south of Kisangani, ex-Stanleyville, ‘lost refugees’ are discovered by an expedition of the UN. They are eighty thousand (!) Hutus from faraway Rwanda, the last survivors of three years of hunger and armed persecution that transpired throughout the vast Congo basin. The film traces those refugees into the heart of the equatorial rainforest, following the hopeless attempts of help.
Kisangani Diary