A story of resilience, of empathic encounters, and of complex, negotiated notions of home within a context of profound political angst, Luis Alejandro Yero’s LLAMADAS DESDE MOSCÚ (Calls from Moscow) introduces four Cuban migrants residing in the Russian capital. All queer, all undocumented, these newcomers working small jobs in construction and online sales reveal their vulnerabilities through sequences captured inside a shared, austere flat. We see the silent enthusiast obsessed with beauty pageants and self-help, the entrepreneurial TikTok influencer, the eventual returnee who misses life on the island, and the one whose calls are never answered. While we witness a tale about migration and mobility, the film provides a sense of fixedness and suspension as its characters are only ever portrayed alone inside their domestic space, one where the trappings of a temporary, pre-furnished apartment provide no sense of belonging. Their isolation is compounded by sub-zero temperatures and COVID-19 confinement measures in the fragile months leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Even if primarily contained to the apartment’s sparse interior—the film only occasionally punctuated by shots of the frigid cityscape—LLAMADAS DESDE MOSCÚ bears witness to the complex current political situation in both Cuba and Russia. In a collective effort to recount the dramatic experience of exodus, the film establishes parallels between the repression from the Russian and Cuban governments, its subjects declaring that they have moved from one country without democracy to another.
In the background of the film sits Cuba’s ongoing economic crisis—the worst since the fall of the Soviet Union—and the civic tension that erupted during July 2021 protests, all of which has enticed citizens to find new avenues for emigration. While historical relations between the island and the former USSR have led generations of Cubans to study, live, and settle in Moscow, more recent migration has been complicated by the intricacies of the war. However, Russia remains—alongside Guyana and Nicaragua— one of the few countries Cubans can enter without undertaking a cumbersome, bureaucratic, and costly visa application.
Since social media is often the main or only form of connection between dispersed communities, mobile phones are central to the migrant experience, and unsurprisingly serve as the beating heart of the film. Far from alienating artifacts, here phones help foster and maintain affective ties. These individuals constantly live in and through their devices as they create or consume online content. The same apparatus—a source of income, connection, and entertainment—serves to document migration journeys, to orient oneself upon arrival, to communicate with friends and family. Capturing and broadcasting their quotidian existence with their phones, the characters contribute to the creation of an exilic queer archive. Their bodies, gestures, memories, and the pain of their diasporic displacement are recorded and kept alive in an act of resistance against institutional homophobia.
The mobile technologies we see in the film have also generated innovative forms of transnational digital narratives, with the devices and their various platforms fostering collective cultural conversations within an expanding public sphere. This life blurred between the digital and physical is explored beautifully in LLAMADAS DESDE MOSCÚ, as Facebook live transmissions, ringtones, chat and comment alerts, echoes caused by faulty connections, and low-battery notifications infiltrate the film’s soundscape.
LLAMADAS DESDE MOSCÚ is a unique entry into the tradition of migrant Cuban cinema, with a filmmaker still based on the island travelling abroad to chronicle and share the diasporic experience of others. Yero inscribes himself within the story during an early scene, recording his own presence on camera as he orchestrates the return of the shooting apartment’s keys. Throughout, the filmmaker incorporates his own exchanges with friends in the form of calls and on-screen text, correspondence to and from a snowy, gelid Moscow and later Havana. These exchanges reveal the many solitudes of first-generation migrants scattered around the world. Marked by nostalgia, separation, and long-distance relations, these lives replicate Cuba’s geographic and political isolation, reminding us of the precarious exploitative labour conditions and mental health issues disproportionately affecting queer migrants of colour. Their messages are wake-up calls for anyone facing similar circumstances, anyone struggling with linguistic or socio-cultural, challenges, fearing change, or experiencing deep longing. We can only hope someone is always listening on the other side of the line.
Zaira Zarza is a film programmer and Assistant Professor at Université de Montréal.
