Abstract

This essay analyzes the aesthetic management of waste as part of border thinking in contemporary Cuban documentaries and the use of exteriority and anonymity in dissent operations. Based on the analysis of three documentaries, directed by filmmakers born in the eighties, I propose to explore how documentary fiction, according to Jacques Rancière’s term, creates a mise-en-scene of isolation, ruin, debris to accompany the representation of the elderly who live on the fringes of utopia. The interpellation of the social and political project undertaken by the Cuban Revolution occurs through a new audiovisual conception, where the symbolic density and value of border thinking crystallize as political actions and disagreement.