The La Habana de Fito film, by Juan Pin Vilar, presented in the official ‘Out of Competition Documentary’ section of the Festival de Málaga, is a tribute to the musician and composer Rodolfo Páez, better known as Fito Páez. The multifaceted Argentinean artist, nicknamed El trovador del rock argentino, is considered the soul of rock in his country and throughout Latin America. During his more than forty years of professional career, Fito Páez has demonstrated his versatility with a musical oeuvre of 28 studio albums, a maxisingle, four live albums and twelve compilations, and has worked as a director, screenwriter, performer and novelist.

His musical career led him to Cuba and Havana, and it is precisely this relationship that’s the subject of the documentary La Habana de Fito (Fito’s Havana). Cuban filmaker Juan Pin Vilar has known Fito Paez for some time, and the idea for this project was born out of a conversation they had. 

'We were sitting on a terrace and started talking about life. Then we realised that each of us was writing down each other’s girlfriends', joked Pin Vilar in the discussion after the screening, in which the producer Alfredo Calviño also took part. 'So we asked for a tape recorder so that the conversation, and the truth, could be recorded. We wanted a recorder so that this story would be told to our children when we were gone'. 

Instead of a tape recorder, they left a camera, and years later, when they saw that material, they decided to recover archive material from various institutions and shoot a documentary that aims to summarise what they lived through between 1959 and 1989, years in which Cuba went through a change that they themselves experienced. 'Cuba will never be the Cuba that I lived or that Fito Paez lived'. The hour-long film offers a vision they both had of Cuba, of what happened and what they both experienced.

Juan Pin Vilar is a film director, writer and producer with a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of Havana. For more than a decade, he directed Cuban television programmes, which also aired in Mexico and the United States. He produces and directs music programmes and documentaries on Latin American cultural celebrities. He has lived in Cuba and Mexico. In addition to fiction, concert videos and TV series, in 2017 he directed the documentary Pablo Milanés, winner of the Lucía Award at the IFF in Gibara.