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A broken projector delays a French Film Festival screening by an hour, 14ymedio reports
The screening at Havana's Charles Chaplin cinema began an hour late in a room without air conditioning; the 23 y 12 cinema, home of Cuba's Cinemateca, had a broken projector.
The 27 edition of the French Film Festival opened on Thursday at Havana's Yara cinema with Christophe Barratier's The Children of Resistance, with the director present at the opening alongside French ambassador Raphaël Trannoy, the president of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, Alexis Triana, and the director of Cuba's Cinemateca, Luciano Castillo, according to 14ymedio.
A moviegoer described to the outlet her visit on Friday to a screening at the Charles Chaplin cinema: the room had no air conditioning, the seats were nearly empty and at 2:22 p.m. the film, scheduled for 2:00 p.m., still had not started. An usher explained that there was a problem with the projector. The screening began close to an hour behind schedule, by which point about thirty people were left in the room.
The 23 y 12 cinema, the Cinemateca de Cuba's main screening venue, was not an alternative that day: its projector was broken, as the outlet itself confirmed. The moviegoer ended up going home without seeing any of the program, because of the time lost and the difficulty of finding transport back.
The festival features 17 films and runs until November 4; after the weekend screenings at the Chaplin and the Yara, it will continue only at the Yara. The festival arrives, 14ymedio writes, “in the middle of the worst economic crisis the island has lived through since 1959, with daily blackouts of more than 20 hours.”
CiberCuba, which picked up the report, placed the episode in a run of earlier difficulties: in December 2024 the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema cancelled screenings because of power cuts, and in December 2025 it installed generators and mobile screens. The site added that about 80% of the roughly 398 cinemas that once existed in the country have closed in recent decades, a figure whose source it does not specify.
Sources: 14ymedio · CiberCuba
Data updated: 2026-10-25T20:00:00.000Z