Review: Chronicles of the Absurd
Still from Chronicles of the Absurd. © Miguel Coyula and Lynn Cruz
“In Cuba, if you point a camera at someone in a society where people are living with two faces all of the time, they will behave differently.” These are the words of Miguel Coyula, whose solution is a film about the Kafka-esque repression of Cuban bureaucracy composed almost entirely of secretly recorded audio clips: Chronicles of the Absurd. The film charts almost a decade of harassment as Coyula and Lynn Cruz (Coyula’s wife and lead actor) film and distribute a subversive and independent sci-fi film. Their screenings are shut down, Cruz’s contracts frozen, her father denied medical care, their friends intimidated.
Chronicles is rendered through a collagelike animation of scattered phone videos, Facebook photos, and provocative, paintings of Expressionist demons (courtesy of painter Antonia Eiriz) to represent faceless Cuban bureaucrats. The disconnect between these captioned photos and these intensifying scenarios can be terrifying at times; at others, it is dull and repetitive—a static foil for the passionless cyclicality of pencil pushers following orders. The strategy becomes more than a gimmick but an effective rhetorical tool. As the boldness of the duo grows, so too do their risky attempts to film their opponents, a moment that solidifies the necessity of film.
Still from Chronicles of the Absurd. © Miguel Coyula and Lynn Cruz
Coyula collapses the boundaries between the personal, the artistic, the intellectual, and the political in part by threading together interrogations, family illness, and festival tours across vast periods. The way they are edited together makes these categories inescapable from each other. This makes the film both incredibly specific about life, art creation, and politics within Cuba but an equally poignant testimony to the reason why film is such an essential medium. Coyula speaks about showing the film in Egypt, where he felt it could be used to speak about Egyptian censorship and bureaucracy in a way films with an Egyptian subject could not. As Coyula puts it, “If you're gonna be an independent filmmaker, you need to take advantage of the fact that you don't have to answer to anybody and to be critical of all the societies that are involved in a conflict.”
The political intention of Chronicles seems rooted in freedom of expression, in an experiment of visibility. Coyula is called an “agent of the Cuban government” in Miami, a surveilled dissident at home. The entire film places Coyula/Cruz in a political purgatory, attacked for invoking and criticizing Fidel Castro by footsoldiers and intellectuals without any personal respect for Castro. One bureaucrat makes a joke about Castro, another calls Cruz/Coyula radicals for speaking ill of him, and an intellectual in Spain criticizes Coyula for interrogating Castro as a symbol at all. Each of these forces sees the political ramifications of criticism as a means to an end, but Coyula seems more interested in the questions, the prods, and the challenges than the answers. Coyula does not investigate what happens when Castro is problematized in Cuban society; he investigates what happens when you try.
Still from Chronicles of the Absurd. © Miguel Coyula and Lynn Cruz
Chronicles broadens to be about the impact of using technology and art as personal protective measures—an attempt to use a medium of imagination and trickery to express truth. This is not a didactic treatise, but a record of circumstances, a reflection of the reality for Cuban artists.
Coyula’s film reminded me of Mohammad Rasoulof’s 2024 The Seed of the Sacred Fig, another film made secretly within its subject country that utilizes its restricted production to expose and to interrogate. Sacred Fig combines its questioning of medium with a very concrete politics. Whereas Rasoulof filmed and incorporated riots in Iran into his storytelling and drama, Coyula stays personal, without video, without outright political didactics, and with safety. Coyula and Cruz could travel to Queens to speak after their screening, but Rasoulof had to flee a prison sentence and a flogging in Iran.
Still from Chronicles of the Absurd. © Miguel Coyula and Lynn Cruz
“I don't think we are that courageous.” Coyula says. “There are people that risk much more than us. I just love film.” Chronicles is a reminder that not every piece of art can afford to upend one’s entire life. Sometimes you can’t make work that damns you to exile, torture, or death. What Coyula does is experiment with limits, with what kind of truth film can capture. He illustrates a model for a truly necessary, immediate, and uncompromisingly indie filmmaking. Amid such repression, the truth is enough.
