Maria Espinoza Stransky

In Guita Schyfter’s El águila y el gusano, an intricate plot serves to intersect the destinies of several characters: the owner of a beauty salon in love with “all things Chinese”, a politician with a taste for oration who couldn’t care less about the problems of his country, a political adviser whose counsel is never considered and a shady investigator with a name that nobody seems to recall. The script by Schyfter and Hugo Hiriart, her longtime collaborator and author of the 2013 novel on which the film is based, bristles with finely-crafted, hilarious dialogue.

Exploration between the characters and the filmmaker. A quest into a universal existential problem, how to inhabit the world. Members of a family leave their home and in the middle of the Cuban Sierra Maestra struggle to find a new one. During this process they inhabit scenes of a routine life in the middle of nature, outside of a closed space between four walls, place and concept they long and project. It concludes with the departure of the patriarch and the already palpable absence of a father with dark gaze who dreams of going far away from his country in the pursuit of something different, becomes a reality. Contemplative meditation of an internal torment.