Mafifa

The city of Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, is renowned for its conga music, the soundtrack to the annual carnival. It’s here that the filmmaker Daniela Muñoz comes, on a quest to trace the legacy of the late Gladys Linares Acuña, also known as “Mafifa,” a legendary player of the bell, a conga percussion instrument. Forty years on from her death, the memory of this extraordinary woman, moving in a mostly man’s world, lives on through the oral testimonies of those who knew her. Daniela builds a movingly impressionistic portrait of Mafifa, filming with an intimate and immersive verité style, her camera almost an extension of her body. Intimate, too, are the glimpses we get into the world of the filmmaker, who has progressive hearing loss and for whom the search for Mafifa is like a search for her own self. (JA) Preceded by short “Caballo de Espuma”