“Cinema is Prophecy — It Creates Truth”: Hubert Sauper on his Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, Epicentro

"What kind of future does tourism portend?” wonders a Cuban character rhetorically in Epicentro, the latest work of cinematic nonfiction from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Hubert Sauper (Darwin’s Nightmare, We Come as Friends). “None! It is only devouring the future,” the Havana man declares. Indeed, it devours the “past and the culture,” rendering everything “superficial.” But then comes the real multimillion-dollar question, “How much does cinema resemble tourism?”

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at this year’s Sundance, Epicentro — an allusion to the northern Caribbean island’s place at the epicenter of the Americas, both geographically and politically — is a visually intoxicating and profoundly insightful exploration/interrogation of Spanish colonialism, US imperialism, and cinema as myth-making propaganda tool. And all set against the stunning backdrop of today’s Cuba, a “paradise” of ’50s nostalgia, where American sightseers — or “human beings in their worst possible form” as one character puts it — snap photos of kiddie locals as if at a human zoo. (No wonder so many indigenous folks historically viewed photography as soul stealing.)

Just prior to the film’s August 28th virtual launch through Kino Marquee, Filmmaker caught up with Sauper — a globetrotting master of sociopolitical doc-making who was born in the Austrian Alps and raised amongst a population that had lived (and served) in Nazi Germany — to discuss his astonishingly grand take on a territorially tiny, globally significant nation.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.