Jose Luis Aparicio Ferrera is a filmmaker, critic, and independent curator. He holds a degree in Film Direction from the Higher Institute of Art in Cuba (ISA). His thesis short film El Secadero (Dryland, 2019) won the Best Fiction Award at BannabáFest in Panama and an Honorable Mention at Cinema Ciudad de México, as well as the Audience Award and Best Production at the Muestra Joven Festival, Cuba. The short was also selected at film festivals in Latin America and the United States, such as the Seattle Latino Film Festival, the Icarus Festival in Guatemala, and the BioBioCine in Chile. His medium-length documentary Sueños al pairo (Dreams Adrift, 2020), censored by the Cuban government, had its world premiere at BAFICI in Argentina and has been selected at European festivals such as the up-and-coming International Film Festival Hannover, the International Film Festival Film for Democratic Memory (FESCIMED) and the MAX Diversity Film Festival, in addition to winning the Award for Best Cultural Representation at the International Austral Film Festival (FICA).
His latest fiction short film, Tundra (2021), had its world premiere at Curta Cinema, Rio de Janeiro International Short Film Festival, and its North American premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. In 2019 he was named among the “One Hundred Latinos Who Create and Inspire a Better Future” by Avianca magazine in Colombia. As a film critic, he created the initiative Cine Cubano en Cuarentena (Cuban Cinema in Quarantine, CCC), a collaborative effort aimed at the preservation, research and exhibition of the Cuban cinematographic legacy. He has written about cinema and the arts for magazines such as Rialta, Hypermedia, El Estornudo, IPS Cuba, ADN Cuba and Cine Cubano. He also contributed three articles to the encyclopedia A Cuban Cinema Companion (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
He worked as a programmer for the II Independent Film Festival of Mexico City and currently works as the main curator of the INSTAR Film Festival. For INSTAR, he is also curating the exhibition “Land without Images: Cuban Cinema of the Absent” for documenta15. He was a member of the Mezcal Jury at the 33rd Guadalajara International Film Festival and participated in the 3rd Castello Errante International Film Residency, organized in Italy by Occhi di Giove and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. In late 2021 he gave a workshop “Deconstructing a Community's Visual Archive” for The New Alphabet School #CommunityBuilding, organized by HKW Berlin. He is currently developing two feature films: the creative documentary El mar (The Sea) and the fiction project Ismael.