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«Baracoa», by Luis Ernesto Doñas, wins two prizes at the Trieste film festival

The Italian-Cuban co-production took the Audience Award and the Best Screenplay prize in the Contemporary Cinema competition at the festival's 41st edition, handed out on Sunday in the Italian city, according to CiberCuba.

«Baracoa», directed by the Cuban filmmaker Luis Ernesto Doñas, won the Audience Award and the Best Screenplay prize in the Contemporary Cinema competition at the 41st edition of the Trieste Ibero-Latin American Film Festival, handed out on Sunday at the Miela cinema theatre, according to CiberCuba. The screenplay is credited to Doñas and the Italian Filippo Ascion.

The film mixes drama and comedy in a journey across Cuba that begins after the death of Felipe, an Italian revolutionary who became a Cuban citizen. His son Pepe, marked by homophobic prejudice and by the wish to emigrate, travels from Havana to Baracoa with Jimmi, a doctor who at night becomes the drag queen Estrellita. Felipe is played by Giancarlo Giannini, and the character is inspired by Gino Doné Paro, an Italian anti-fascist partisan and the only European who took part in the Granma yacht expedition.

Doñas, born in 1984, trained at the Higher Institute of Art in Havana and at the International Film and Television School of San Antonio de los Baños, and went on to build a career as an opera and theatre director based in Rome. «Baracoa» is his first fiction feature: it began its run at the Havana International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in December 2025 and passed through Taormina and Lucca before Trieste.

The festival, founded in 1985 by the Association for the Promotion of Latin American Culture in Italy, is one of the oldest Latin American film events in Europe. The prize comes at a time of crisis for cinema in Cuba: blackouts have forced generators to be installed at the Havana festival and pushed the Gibara Poor Cinema Festival from April to July 2026.

Sources: CiberCuba

Data updated: 2026-11-03T16:15:00.000Z

«Baracoa», by Luis Ernesto Doñas, wins two prizes at the Trieste film festival | Yamacoa Observatory