Taxibol

synopsis

A taxi driver and his passenger drive through Cuban villages and talk about travel, heartbreak and human destiny. One speaks English, the other Spanish, yet they find mutual trust and understanding. The passenger, a Filipino filmmaker, tells the taxi driver the shocking reason why he is in Cuba and asks for cooperation in his search. A seemingly documentary prologue opens a journey into the last days of a former general of the Philippine dictator hiding on a banana plantation. The history of colonialism and political dictatorship emerges in the blazing Cuban sun in a film standing on the borderline between reality and fiction.

“It is a thrillingly anticlimactic story of an overwhelming calm and a horror so absolute that it is confused with everyday life; it is immanent to it and is therefore definitive, omnipresent, absolute as the air.” — Antonio Enrique Gonzáles Rojas, Rialta Magazine

Source: Rialta Magazine

biography

Italian independent filmmaker Tommaso Santambrogio (1992) lived and studied between Milan, Paris, Rome and Havana. He is the author of several short films that were screened at the Venice Film Festival. His first feature film, Oceans Are the Real Continents (2023), will be released this year.

more about film

director:	Tommaso Santambrogio
cast:	Lav Díaz, Gustavo Fleita, Mario Limonta
producer:	Ivan Casagrande Conti, Marco Malfi Chindemi, Tommaso Santambrogio
script:	Tommaso Santambrogio
photography:	Lorenzo Casadio Vannucci, Tommaso Santambrogio
editing:	Matteo Faccenda​
sound design:	Tommaso Barbaro

contact

Lights On / Flavio Armone
lightson@lightsonfilm.org