The restoration of Inside Downtown (2001), by Nicolás Guillén Landrián and Jorge Egusquiza Zorrilla, between painting and cinema

This essay centers on Inside Downtown (2001), the final moving image work by the Cuban filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián. In collaboration with Jorge Egusquiza, the documentary is the filmmaker’s only audiovisual work produced from exile in Miami. Taking Inside Downtown as a starting point, the article will explore the intermedial ‘dialogue’ (Schmid 2019) between the filmmaker’s work as a painter and his cinematic oeuvre. This intermedial dialogue allows us to construct a continuity in Guillén Landrián’s creative practice, where previous critics have instead detected a gap or ‘silence’ in his cinematographic work. I will argue that the encounter between cinema and painting also acts as a conceptual space to consider the temporal intervention enacted by restoration as a collective and individual ritual.