From Joystick to Canon

From Joystick to Canon / Regina Coyula

From Regina Coyula's blog, 9 June 2017 (Ed. note: These interview
fragments are being translated out of order by TranslatingCuba.com
volunteers. When they are all done we will assemble them in order into
one post.)

The country was falling to pieces, there were people drowning in the sea
and on land, there was something called the Diaspora, but we bourgeois
teenagers of Havana's Vedado neighborhood knew nothing. Our lives
revolved around a company and Japanese console. In my SuperNintendo
years, Miguel was already a legend. Coyula was a gamer before gaming.
His name passed like a password between initials. You don't know how to
kill a boss on one of the levels of the game? Ask Coyula. You don't know
how to activate this or that power? Go see Coyula.

We were playing Street Fighter II Turbo and Coyula already had Super
Street Fighter II. We went to see him so he could show us the four new
fighters and the recent versions of others. I remember that he revealed
on the screen the improved attacks of Vega, the Spanish ninja that was
my favorite fighther. Afterwards he started to clarify for us some
technical doubts about The Lion King. And I remember that, while he was
leading Simba over some cliffs, I looked at his hyperconcentrated face
and had a revelation, "This guy is alienated, bordering on autism, he's
going to melt, he probably does nothing else in his life," I said to
myself. "I have to give up video games, because if I don't, I'll end up
like Coyula."

Unfortunately, I quit videogames. Then time passed and I saw [Coyula's]
movie Memories of Overdevelopment. I saw it, by the way, before I saw
Memories of Underdevelopment, which now seems to me like a regular
prequel and a little drawn out. Sergio, the protagonist of Memories of
Overdevelopment, ends up in a desert landscape that looks like another
planet. He's carrying a Barbie doll and his brother's ashes, which are
the ashes of the Mariel boatlift and, after that, of the Revolution. To
summarize. In 2010, Miguel Coyula scattered the ashes of Cuba in the
desert in Utah; he dispersed these ashes in a psychotronic dust, between
mutant and Martian. Seven years later, there are many people who still
haven't noticed.

I like that there is a guy like him in Cuban cinema.

Source: From Joystick to Canon / Regina Coyula – Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/from-joystick-to-canon-regina-coyula/