PETRICOR


Documentary, 2022
Color | 9'30 | Spanish | Cuba-Belgium 
DocNomads
 
Like a journal page suspended in time, I explore the uprooting feeling of being away from Cuba through cinema and plants.





Filmed by: Violena Ampudia
Script: Violena Ampudia & Kim Elizondo
Cinematography, Editing & Sound design: Violena Ampudia
Sound Mixing: Aurelien Lebourg
Color Grading: Sujay Iyer
With: Aleia Aldana, Lu Vilda König, Alara König, Violena Ampudia








SHOWCASE:

2024

/ CUBAN CINEMA WITHOUT BORDERS, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, California.

/ INSTAR INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, Paris-California-Cuba-Barcelona-Munich.

/ USELESS FRONTIERS #2, cycle of contemporary self-referential cinema, Lens Film School,  Madrid.

2023

/ Contemporary Cuban documentary film exhibition, Casa de América, Madrid

PRESS:

¨In Petricor, Violena Ampudia weaves images of floating plants scattered in her apartment in Belgium; the composition is intimate. The space is narrow and her voice seems to rub the objects... (Only for an instant the camera leaves her room to listen and contemplate the tender daughters of a friend of hers who decided to put down roots outside Cuba). The trigger for her filmic reflection is a WhatsApp audio where a friend comments to the filmmaker that she dreamed of Cuba transformed into a huge floating cemetery. Cuba is far from being a fertile land for her plants, which originated there. Violena's emphasis on floating roots is an emphasis on her own sensibility, which evokes those verses by Jamila Medina Ríos: “He emigrated / There is something there with dispossession: / roots with nowhere to grab”. Violena says she experiences a nostalgia that results from “the need to know what place she occupies in the present”; that nostalgia permeates the entire atmosphere of the images, it is the very subject of her enunciation.¨

¨Personal archives, war conflicts, emigration and political violence at the 5th INSTAR Film Festival¨ written by Angel Perez for RIALTA


***


¨For Violena Ampudia, the dilemma of the exile has a precise and delicate metaphor in the floating garden that mottles over the tables of her temporary “camp” in Belgium, during her creative residency at Docs Nomads, which favored the filming of Petricor. A myriad of glass jars contain fragile plants, whose roots do not yet know the soil in which they should naturally take root.

This forest, of the same Cuban origin as Ampudia, remains in a precarious, intermediate state of dangerous transience. It does not even have the luck of a greenhouse, which would provide them with small portions of land to favor their first growths. They are in danger of atrophying or drowning in the short term, unable to hold on to anything. Their development is compromised, regardless of the care they are given. They are as much in crisis as their caregiver, who seems to be in equally unstable territory, although more likely than the country she left in the irreversible past.

The filmmaker deals with the psychological and cultural reconstruction that exile imposes on her in a world that looks like a beautiful but strange marsh where emotion contrasts with nostalgia, liquefying any possible sense of stability.¨


Diario de Cuba