Kim Anno and Kyung Lee’s documentary ¡Quba! is a deep dive into the intersections of activism, identity, and cultural resilience in Cuba. With a background rooted in avant-garde art and an unwavering commitment to LGBTQ+ rights, Kim Anno brings a unique visual and thematic perspective to this film, while Kyung Lee’s documentary expertise helps shape its compelling narrative. Their collaboration resulted in a complex yet vibrant story of queer activism within a socialist society, offering an intimate look at individuals who challenge norms and redefine revolution on their own terms.

In this conversation, they share it all, revealing more about the challenges that they face in the making of this powerful documentary film.

1. Kim, could you please tell us a bit about your journey as a filmmaker so far?

Kim Anno: I grew up in Los Angeles and in reaction to the dominance of the entertainment industry I wanted to be an artist, I wanted to colour outside the lines, and I gravitated towards the avant-garde, performance, my first teachers were at the Feminist studio workshop in downtown LA, and my earliest work was interviewing the public in Mac Arthur Park about what they thought was contemporary art. I spent all of my coming of age and adulthood becoming a painter and going to the San Francisco Art Institute to find the most radical ideas I could find.

Years would go by and I became somewhat disenchanted by this “art world” and in 2009, I saw a photograph that changed my art practice altogether. I had been making monumental scale abstract paintings for years and suddenly I wanted more content again.

It was a photograph of Mohammed Nasheed signing documents underwater with his cabinet from the Maldives. Something clicked inside. It was then that I wanted to change my audience in the fine art world reach a younger demographic and focus on climate issues in my creative work. My first films were water puppet shows in water tanks with objects, light, and buoyancy experiments, and eventually, I moved to find people to film in order to gain empathy directly. But because of being an abstract painter I would push against a narrative, but of course, everything one rebels from becomes desire eventually.

I began to love Robert Wilson, his art, and his theatre, even the theatrical curtains he designed, his work as a director and set designer, I also loved David Lynch’s absurdity and eventually understood that irony was a great tool in filmmaking. I made a number of short works very experimental, each of the cast was wearing white collar office outfits to try and conduct business in ocean scenes, I used iconic ancient Greek plays, and I secularized a series of Dante’s Cantos, and always with music was key in these. Many were performed live with quartets or bands.

Then while making one of these in Southern Florida, my crew and I became curious about Cuba in 2016, and we went fully intending to shoot a short environmental work, and then suddenly because we went during the La Jornada, the LGBTQ gathering in Havana and Matanzas, we changed course, and decided to shoot for two films at once. Yes, I think back now how crazy that was.

 

2. Kyung Lee, can you share with us, how you came to collaborate with Kim on this film?

Kyung Lee: Kim and I have been friends for many years. My involvement in ¡Quba! began midway in the production. This is her first feature documentary project while I have been working in the documentary filmmaking world for some time. I wanted to lend my support and expertise to help her bring her vision to life.

 

3. Kim what would you say was the inspiration for making this film?

Kim: The inspiration for this film, was that I was an LGBTQ activist myself in the 1980s, 90s. The Aids crisis, and Act Up heightened this, as well as the sex wars which were sexuality debates. I would go on to connect the dots with other issues, always understanding that if one wanted equal rights you had to push for it, no one was going to hand it to you on a silver platter. When Obama opened the door to go to Cuba as an American I was deeply curious. What was happening there? How could a tiny island cause so much aversion in the US?

There must be something that seemed different from the endless greed and violence in the US. I wasn’t naïve about the problems but I was curious about what was good there. So we went, and I was amazed at the activism for LGBTQ human rights within a socialist society, I couldn’t see any other country with those two things intersecting. That remains a fascination today. The activists were also both inside and outside the government, they worked together in opposition to the very influential and intimidating Methodist church which seemed flush with funding from United States churches.

The Cubans have a dry sense of humour, telenovela humour infuses much of the live theatre,and  they do a lot with a little. The economic embargo is devastating to the island, especially after the pandemic which crushed the tourism industry there. The LGBTQ activists were using the high-level cultural tools that Cuba has to win hearts and minds. We watched Silverio take a multi-faceted theatrical production into a tiny town of campesinos which ended with a speech on the perils of homophobia and transphobia and a drag show. The teenagers were chuckling and the townspeople were loving it. I realized that this kind of direct exposure was extremely persuasive. This kept me fueled to find out more for several more years.

 

4. How did you identify and settle on the LGBTQ activists and artists featured in the film? What was the creative process of making these choices like?

Kim: I knew two characters that had to be in the film, were the first trans legislator in the country, Adela Hernandez, and her friend and fellow leader, Ramon Silverio, impresario and theatre director in Santa Clara, These two had been working on LGBTQ acceptance for at least 20 years, and each had a unique perspective and were each responsible for many others. Adela had been in prison for being gay after her father turned her in, and it was horrible. But she got out and became a health care worker, and eventually an elected leader, all the while performing and living as a woman who was born a man. Adela is the conscience of the film and in a sense a narrator who comments on the hypocrisy of her constituents who were criticizing gay people. Adela also tells us about the fact that she is “more revolutionary than gay” meaning that she supported the revolution entirely despite her imprisonment, and she forgave Fidel Castro for this. She was and is a unique person. Silverio as well, has built an enormous community in Santa Clara with a large community theatre, café, home, art gallery, dance hall etc. He speaks about “diversidad” meaning serving all generations and identities at El Mejunje. He was always so positive and was compassionate towards anyone’s transgressions. While we were there his flatscreen TV was stolen, and he simply waited for the thief to bring it back, which eventually was the case.

In addition, I had to find people in Santiago De Cuba, Cuba’s second-largest city, and I wanted to find women and the younger generation and see what their lives were like. Many of them lived in very humble dwellings, but their lives were full and rich with culture, and their activism to gain the right of lesbians to have children, and artificial insemination. They were very cognizant that their conditions were not acceptable and they wanted to make change through their speaking engagements, conferences, neighborhood councils etc. I found two lovers who were fostering a young child as their own. Ana and Maritza. Understanding their love relationship became somewhat romantic in the film. We also interviewed the leader of Cenesex, Mariela Castro niece of Fidel who has been advocating for the LGBTQ cause for her whole adult life, and having the lens of public health was her strategy, as she brought the issue to the medical schools.

 

5. How important was it for you to blend historical context with the presentation of contemporary activism in this film?

Kim: It was very important to depict the past to show the difference of the contemporary moment. It was hard to do, we found a piece of film that was owned by a renowned filmmaker from El Salvador, Jorge Dalton, son of Roque Dalton who was executed by the FLMN during the Salvadorean war, mistakenly. They branded him a enemy when in fact he was not according to many people. He was a poet and had lived in Cuba and was a part of the revolution from the intellectuals and the University professors. Eventually, he left Cuba and moved back to El Salvador which I am sure is deeply troubling to his family and particularly his talented son, Jorge. But Jorge had this image of gay men being beaten in Havana in black and white, and this became important for our film. The revolutionary period was heady but hard for others. Machismo knows no party and it has led to many countries hurting their LGBTQ populations. We didn’t want to go over the same material as other films in the past, but we did have to indicate the arc of time. This was important.

6. Also, how did you approach portraying Fidel Castro’s complicated legacy regarding LGBTQ rights?

Kim: I was keenly aware of two things, one I was an American and Cuba was entirely new to me and I didn’t want to make an assumption without experiencing the country myself. I found that people could walk and chew gum at the same time.

They could be advocating for themselves and be critical of machismo and homophobia and the unequal treatment of queer people and also support the revolution. This was unexpected and quite compelling. One would assume that cultural critics in Cuba were entirely dissident but that was not the case. And it was the case that the government agency was litigating cases of homophobia on the island. The Cenesex agency which focuses on public health was taking on the leadership that eventually was marriage equality voted in by the population.

Through my research, I found out that Fidel apologized for homophobia on the part of the state in 2015 in the La Jornada newspaper in Mexico City. His voice was contrite. We tried to offer images of Fidel that could be looked upon a ironic, and also parallel, like his comments about racism, and showing that he was a very complicated leader.

One can speculate about so many other issues in Cuba to critique but in this area, there was a turnaround. He was as full of machismo as one could get in the early days but he was also conscious of racism, and class issues. Adela says “When you do a lot of things, you make a lot of mistakes too. “

What would I have done if I had lived through the many other difficulties in Cuba, I probably would’ve been upset and advocating for many things. But I am also advocating for many things in the US, especially now. As an American who has been privileged by growing up with a material existence that is quite different, I had to listen more and talk less. I didn’t want to alienate my subjects so I accepted the contradictions. I have great respect for everyone trying to make a better world.

 

7. Whilst making this film, was there anything surprising that you learnt that influenced the creative direction of this film?  

Kim: I could not have made this film work without Kyung Lee. She is a master editor, as people have told me, documentary editors are a special breed. They have no road map, especially for a first-time feature director like myself. I was the one shooting in the dark, following threads, and never thinking for a minute about how the structure would happen. Every minute there are minefields in terms of music because the characters always perform super famous pop songs, Latin music seems to be the most popular music in the world, and therefore the most out of our economic range to license. We had to honor the performances but then we had to pay for them, and sometimes this was not possible. Brittany Douziech was also instrumental for us, as our music license director…And we had a composer, Marc Zollinger who was very new to scoring a film, and this was also sometimes tricky. There was so much music in the film, it could’ve been a music film but we had to choose. I was surprised in the end how we could punctuate the ending because we filmed two referendums the first one was the constitution and the second one was the family code. The first was not a victory for marriage equality because of the church’s influences, but then two years later the activists carved that pumpkin and there the law was.

Kyung: I believe that the film needs to reflect the reality of the current situation in Cuba. The living conditions in Cuba are undeniably challenging. While the film mainly focuses on LGBTQ activism, we tried to infuse the hard life circumstances that Cuban people are currently experiencing shaped by the post-pandemic economic crisis and the impact of the embargo.

 

8. The film captures multiple cities and regions rather than just focusing on Havana. How important was it for the narrative to capture these cities?

Kim: I was the one who insisted on going to multiple cities because there are differences between the cities, and not everyone has the same story. I felt that we had to do justice to the strongest characters, and they did not know each other in the beginning. Santiago de Cuba always feels second class to Havana, and I didn’t want that to happen, I wanted Santiago to also have its place. Also because Las Isabellas lived there, and they were fascinated in their work and the way they worked together. No one discounted any constituency and they beavered through each other’s neighbourhoods, schools, workplaces, etc. Ana was advocating at the airport where she worked for example.

Even with rolling blackouts, these folks continued.

 

 

9. What do you hope viewers take away from this film, especially those unfamiliar with Cuba?

Kim: I hope people see the story behind this extraordinary event, the referendum itself is very rare in Cuba, and seeing how much effort to get to the population was stunning. The neighbourhoods are all organized into groups and people met there, and they met everywhere else, and even a small town such as Caibarién with a population of 40,000 had 33 polling locations. I hope people can find the commonality of the struggle of human rights for LGBTQ people and how victory can be had. This is such a stark contrast to the attacks on our community in the United States now. I wanted people to see the hearts and minds of these characters, and to understand what they worked for. The tools of this movement were arts and culture, and how effective that was, especially in Cuba where culture is very very important, and people rehearse all year for the gala to perform, and visual art and music are all world-class. I hope they hear the joy of the music. I hope they see the tenacity of these amazing people as well.

 

10. After all is said and done, what impact do you hope this film has on the global LGBTQ movement?

Kim: Our hope is that the LGBTQ movement can be acknowledged for its strength, and joy in organizing, I hope that all of us in the US now under such horrible attacks can feel that against all odds we can prevail. Machismo and patriarchy are now ever-present where we are in America and the destruction of these forces are very clear. I hope young people can see there is hope.

 

11. After ¡Quba!, what other projects are you working on?

Kim: I am hard at work and in production on a film in Indonesia: Water Cities, Indonesia which is an environmental film, it’s a hybrid as we have staged elements in the project. I am working with a dance choreographer, Eko Supriyanto and we have made a dance for the Orangutan. Jakarta is moving to Borneo in part, as they build out a new city, and I am taking the point of view of Gen Z and how they imagine a new future with such a dramatic landmass loss due to sea level rise and subsidence. We are following four teenagers who navigate this future, as well as animals, and the contribution of cultures, such as Indigenous dance.

I am also casting a project with characters of female pilots who I am imagining were the pilots that supported the Enola Gay to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I am very worried about a nuclear war coming closer, and where we live there is a navy airstrip that had planes supporting the Enola Gay’s mission in the Pacific war theatre. This is my set for the film.

Kyuni: I have been venturing into creating animation and am working on my hybrid film tentatively titled Gary Needs an Apartment. This film blends experimental animation with live-action footage, following Gary in his quest to hold on to his rent-controlled apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area where soaring rents have become an all-too-familiar challenge.

 

 

12. Lastly, what advice would you give to filmmakers who want to use film as a tool for activism?

Kim: My advice is that stick to the stories, and work against the impulse to document everything, work against trying to make the message over the artistry of the film. The artistry is the best tool of the film of persuasion. But the editor is the one that really shapes a social story, and one has to really question everything you do. We did. It was exhausting but also it was the right path. There is so much to make films about now, don’t hesitate, shoot first fund later sometimes. Of course, you have to get there too, but don’t hold back from your instincts also be the listener, and let the participants guide you by stepping back.

Kyung: Films can be inspirational and educational tools for activists worldwide who are facing similar struggles. However, to be truly effective, the story needs to be well-told and compelling in order to reach a wider audience. My advice is, first and foremost, to focus on crafting a strong story.

Through ¡Quba!, Anno and Lee present a nuanced portrait of Cuba’s evolving LGBTQ+ landscape, blending historical context with the immediacy of contemporary struggles. Their exploration is both a celebration of resilience and a contemplation of progress, revealing the intricate ways activism thrives even in unexpected places. As the film captures personal and political transformations, it ultimately underscores the universal truth that change whether societal or personal requires both resistance and empathy.

 

Certainly, they are not just filmmakers, they are activists. I am eager to see what they each do next using the powerful tool of film.

In Conversation With Reina K., brings to you the kind of scoop that gives you a real insight into the mind, drive and craft of filmmakers from across the world.