A poetic, visionary and surreal film directed by the Italian artist Desiderio, ¡Ahora si Llego! is the first road movie set in Cuba. A rickety and poetic journey inspired by the one undertaken by Che Guevara and his fellow man Alberto Granado.
Three months on an old Ural with a sidecar: Desiderio, an Italian surreal-pop artist, together with his friend, the cuban artist José Balboa, rides a motorbike – which is always on the verge of breaking down but actually never lets them down – through a quixotic pilgrimage on (three) wheels. Together they travel across the 15 lesser-known cuban provinces to explore the most remote artistic realities of the island: one-room museums, open air galleries shrouded by the jungle, creative labs held together by a few bricks and a couple of wooden boards, where they discuss the higher meaning of art in spite of the lack of resources, reminding us that, even now that Cuba seems destined to change forever, the best resource of the isla is its community’s strength, creativity and vitality.
Desiderio and his friend, with few resources and through many unexpected situations, embark on a journey with a documentary style and a dream-like, visionary soul: the many practical difficulties and the interviews are alternated with surreal scenes, suggestive images and grotesque characters who will call to mind those from Ciprì and Maresco’s movies.
No celebrative or banal trivia for tourists, no stereotypes on the Cuban revolution or salsa music, no motorcycle adventure cliché or trivial images to hang in a frame: dreamy, unusual, odd, often comical and sometimes melancholic, ¡Ahora si Llego! is a journey into friendship and imagination made possible by the stubborn, almost heroic loyalty of an old motorcycle.
Desiderio is the winner of the 2008 Italian Factory Prize for young painters, and two times finalist for the Celeste Prize in the Painting and Video sections. He is mainly known for his short film trilogy – Beauty Hazard (2007), Confabula Spurio (2008) and I Love My Queen (2009) – and for Bluesky (2011), presented at the 54th Biennale in Venezia, and They Win On The Sky (2012), presented at the 11th Biennale in L’Habana. In 2017, Milan’s Fabbrica del Vapore hosted “Nirvana”, an exhibit exploring and celebrating the first ten years of this artist’s studies.