John Hopewell Chief International Correspondent Sandro Fiorin’s Figa Films has snapped up international sales rights to Pavel Giroud’s “El Caso Padilla,” which, selected for the San Sebastian highly competitive Horizontes Latinos, bids fair to become one of the most notable Latin American doc features of 2022.
Variety has also shared in exclusivity a first trailer to the film. The follow-up to Giroud admired 2015 fiction film “El Acompañante,” which won San Sebastian’s Co-Production Forum, “El Caso Padilla” turns on the so-called Padilla Affair.
That climaxed with arrest on March 30, 1971 of Heberto Padilla, one of the most exquisite and trenchant of modern Cuban poets whose 1968 poetry collection “Fuera de Juego” constituted a scathing attack on the lack of liberties in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
Padilla’s arrest signalled the end of a honeymoon between Europe’s left and Castro’s revolution, prompting a letter published in Le Monde – signed by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Italo Calvino and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others – denouncing a “violent” and “sectarian” trend in Cuba.
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