Abstract

This dissertation follows scholarship on transnational film studies, tourism studies, and film and media ethnography to examine Québécois feature films that directly address the issue of international tourism to the island while proposing alternatives to both translocal filmmaking and touristic practices. I investigate the involvement of domestic hospitality businesses in Cuba (paladares, private restaurants located in family households, and casas particulares, bed-and-breakfast-type hostels) as unofficial partners in transnational film productions between Québec and Cuba, namely in the films All you can eat Buddha (Ian Lagarde, 2017), Cuba Merci Gracias (Alex B. Martin, 2018) and Sur les toits Havane (Pedro Ruiz, 2019). I contend that these films constitute cinematic voyages, i.e., the intuitive application of entrepreneurial tactics to leisure and cultural travels, personal affective relations, and domestic spaces and activities in Cuba towards the completion of independent transnational film projects.

Each chapter foregrounds Cuban domesticity in the different capacities it interacts with foreign film and media productions originating from Québec. The first chapter traces the antecedents of these practices and how domesticity appears as an infrastructure and thematic preoccupation that propitiates grassroots forms of cultural diplomacy based predominantly on the creative labor of migrant women. The second chapter examines the flexibility of casas particulares in Cuba as they develop skills, adapt their spaces, and employ local knowledges and workforces to meet the needs of foreign film enterprises. This flexibility results from performing multiple gestures of transborder and transcultural, gendered identifications, acts of solidarity and material care between otherwise unrelated laboring subjects working on location. In the third chapter, I analyze a Québécois road movie and how it turns the domestic into a gendered transnational social space with a matrifocal character. The fourth chapter argues that the process of Latinx-Québécois transnational filmmaking exists in a continuum with the spectral position imposed by the Cuban socialist regime on homosexual identities, transcultural/multiracial affective and sexual arrangements, private tourism venues, and para-legal domestic practices. I contend that latinidad/latinité in Québec and queer/alternative domesticities in Cuba appear as translocal objects negotiated and refashioned through a distinctive Afro-Queer-Caribbean positionality against their respective hostile environments.