The extraordinary journey of Celeste García (2018): the Cuban science fiction comedy that uses aliens as a metaphor for emigration

The Extraordinary Journey of Celeste García (The Extraordinary Journey of Celeste Garcia, 2018) is the first fiction feature film by Arturo Infante, a Cuban screenwriter and director known for short films such as Utopía (2004) and Flash Forward (2006). The film mixes comedy of manners and science fiction — two unusual genres in Cuban cinema — to tell the story of a 60-year-old woman who, tired of a predictable life in Havana, accepts the invitation of some aliens to visit her planet.

What is the movie about

Celeste García (María Isabel Díaz) is a former geography teacher who works as a guide at the Havana planetarium. He lives with his son Pedrito (Omar Franco) and shares his daily life with his sister Zobeida (Tamara Castellanos). When aliens called "Gryokites" contact Earth and offer selected citizens a trip to their world, Celeste is one of the chosen ones. What seems like an absurd story becomes a parable about emigration, the desire for change and the question that Infante himself poses in the international synopsis: "How many light years do we have to travel to find happiness?"

Technical sheet and production

The co-production brought together FassB Films (Germany), The Match Factory Productions and Producciones de la 5ta Avenida (Cuba). Claudia Calviño and Ernst Fassbender produced; Javier Labrador Deulofeu photographed and Joanna Montero edited. The soundtrack is by Magda Rosa Galbán and Juan Antonio Leyva. The cast also includes Néstor Jiménez, Yerlín Pérez, Roberto Espinosa and Reinier Díaz.

Career in festivals

The film debuted in the Discovery section of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) 2018, where it was received as one of the most original proposals in Latin American cinema of the year. Before reaching commercial theaters in Cuba, it accumulated good reviews in specialized publications and toured the international festival circuit with sales managed by The Match Factory.

In 2018, the production company broadcast a fictitious scene in the format of a “special bulletin” of Noticiero Estelar announcing the contact of the Gryokites with Cuba — a marketing campaign that generated viral confusion before being revealed as a promotion for the film.

Why it is still interesting

In this feature, Infante abandoned the most biting satire of his short films to focus on characters with whom the audience can emotionally identify. The mixture of traditional humor — the line at the pre-boarding shelter, the enterprising sister, the lazy son — with the spatial metaphor turns the film into a valuable rarity of recent Cuban cinema: science fiction with very local roots. It is not a Guillermo del Toro film, but it shares with Latin American fantasy cinema the habit of using the impossible to talk about the real.

Where to see it

• Streaming platforms: variable availability depending on region in Latin American film services; consult JustWatch or FlixLatino.
• Festivals and retrospectives: usually programmed in Cuban and Ibero-American film cycles.
• Digital purchase: in some international markets through distributors specialized in Latin arthouse cinema.