Tricontinentale, lettre à ouvrir au cas où

Tricontinental, Letter to Open in Case Of

Laura Cazador
Switzerland, Cuba | 2026 | 96 min
World premiere
Languages : French, Spanish
Subtitles : English, French

A life of political commitment led filmmaker Michèle Firk from the underground support network of the Algerian FLN to the guerrilla struggle in Guatemala. In 1966, she was in Havana when the Tricontinental took place, a conference aimed at forming a united anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist front of countries from the Global South. Laura Cazador dedicates a rich and fascinating archival film to their intertwined histories.

May 1967. The internationalist filmmaker Michèle Firk leaves a letter for her friends “to be opened just in case”. Aged 30, she joins the urban guerrilla in Guatemala, having met some of its members in Havana during the first Tricontinental Conference. The aim of this unprecedented and unique project was to form a united anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist front composed of movements from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Her political awareness is inseparable from her love of cinema. Between the two lies a life of images and concrete commitments, which takes her from the clandestine support network for the Algerian FLN to Parisian activist film clubs, from film criticism to cinema studies in Havana, and from the Tricontinental Conference to urban guerrilla conflict. She will never finish her one and only film project, much like the Tricontinental Conference, which will remain without follow-up. Nearly 60 years later, filmmaker Laura Cazador dedicates this film to her, created as a correspondence across time. If nothing today is the same (“I search for you in the streets of Havana (...), I search for both of you, you and the Tricontinental”), what forms can commitment and struggle through cinema still take?

Mourad-Anis Moussa

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