Thankful to @suninthebelly for organizing a forum for grad students to share their current research projects, however undeveloped. It made me return to an image I had previously neglected to consider.

This is Oscar Torres, a filmmaker exiled from both Cuba and DR in 50s/60s, smoking next to a PR flag in the year of his death in 1968. He studied alongside Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Julio García Espinosa at the Centro Sprimentale di Cinematografia during neorealism's global turn.

In the 50s, he made films for the Puerto Rican Division of Community Education before migrating to Cuba to direct some of the Revolution's groundbreaking first few films, establishing what I believe to be an ethical link between the films of the DIVEDCO and those of the ICAIC.

This proposal also allows us to decenter Europe and the large national cinemas of Latin America as early collaborators in the formation of the New Latin American Cinema. The NLAC canon, despite the turn to transanationalism, tends to favor links between 2nd and 3rd cinemas (cont)

Effacing South-South solidarities in the formation of these (trans)national cinemas, particularly in the case of Revolutionary Cuba. This unease is the subject of my the diss chapter I'm currently working on.

I'm choosing to remain open about my research, despite recent events, because sharing works in progress is my favorite part of academia! I refuse to submit to the notion that we must "guard" our intellectual labor. Nothing I've ever written belongs to myself alone. Trust.