Lázaro J. González is a scholar-practitioner working at the intersection of queer counter-archiving, Caribbean cultural studies, and non-fiction cinema. A PhD candidate in Film & Media at UC Berkeley, his work explores how hybrid, often stateless or borderless moving-image practices can activate historical memory, challenge dominant institutional archives, and document marginalized subjectivities across borders.
Originally from Cuba, Lázaro’s background spans journalism, literature, and global art cinema. He holds a Master of Arts in Literatures, Cultures, and Languages from the University of Connecticut and a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from the University of Havana. His practice has been further shaped by training at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) in San Antonio de los Baños and the Sundance Documentary Lab.
As a documentarian, Lázaro uses research-creation as collaborative praxis to confront systemic erasure and queer trauma in public culture. His work includes the acclaimed features and shorts Máscaras (Masks), Villa Rosa, Pāndēmos (2021), and Parole (2024)—the latter of which was recently awarded Best Short Film at the 2024 Latino and Iberian Film Festival at Yale (LIFFY) and received an honorable mention in Berkeley’s Eisner Competition. His work-in-progress features, Sexilio (Sexile) and Out in the Vortex, continue to expand on these themes, tracing the intergenerational trauma of sexual displacement and the affective burden of athletes confronting institutional homophobia.
As one of Cuba’s first openly queer filmmakers, Lázaro’s work has sparked vital cultural dialogue on the island and across the Americas. His documentaries regularly reach international audiences through prestigious festivals and prominent universities, including Harvard, Yale, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Concordia, and UConn. Complementing his filmmaking, he has engaged in vital cross-border creative collaborations as a visiting artist-in-residence at Queen’s University’s Vulnerable Media Lab and Mexico City’s art-activism residency, Casa Ojalá.
Committed to building independent arts infrastructure, he also co-founded Encuadre (The Cuban Audiovisual Production Network) and Confluencias del Lente to champion Caribbean cinema. His scholarly and curatorial writing has appeared in the anthology Shooting Back: Documentary Film in Latin America and the Caribbean (2026), as well as in peer-reviewed publications such as Anthurium, Rialta, Fantasma Material, and Cine Cubano. González has curated film programs for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), such as Cuban Cinema without Borders and The Short Documentary Films of Sara Gómez. González was also one of the curators of Archipiélago Fílmico: Cuerpos Proscritos (2025), which brought Cuban and Puerto Rican cinemas to cultural landmarks in Mexico City.
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Lázaro J. González
Filmmaker · Scholar · Curator
Cuba, b. 1990 | Based in California
AWARDS/HIGHLIGHTS 2026: Parole and Sexile are included in the series Cuban Independent Cinema: Migration, Diaspora and Transnationalism, by Instituto Cervantes. Parole is also one of the Caribbean films selected for Uconn's Cine ECE Cine Film Fest. 2024–2025: Parole receives Best Short Film at LIFFY 2025, an Honorable Mention in UC Berkeley's Eisner Competition and loops through 20+ international festivals. Sexile screens at Sacramento State. 2022: Visiting Filmmaker at Harvard, Yale, and UCLA. Sexile & Pāndēmos headline the 2nd INSTAR Film Festival (Derivas Queer); Sexile features in San Francisco’s Pacific Felt Factory exhibition. 2021: Pāndēmos hits the official selection at Yale's LIFFY. Serves as Visiting Filmmaker at the College of Charleston and Fairfield University. 2020: Publishes foundational queer archival research via the University of Connecticut. 2019: Villa Rosa wins Best Documentary at Yale's LIFFY, backed by a special screening series through Yale's Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies. 2018: Villa Rosa tours global queer circuits (Stonewall Museum, OutFest Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, Paraguay, and Playa del Carmen). 2017: Villa Rosa wins the Audience Award at the Barcelona International LGBT Film Festival. Masks debuts at Miami's Fuera de Catálogo. 2016: Sexile joins the Sundance Documentary Workshop (Miami). Villa Rosa makes its global premiere at the Havana International Film Festival, sweeping production grants from the Norwegian Film Fund and Sparring Partners. 2015: Masks wins Cuba's National Journalism Award "Rubén Martínez Villena" and secures international distribution via the Sparring Partners Fund. 2014: Secures the prestigious El reino de este mundo fellowship grant for young contemporary artists.
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Parole does not represent; It is the experience of an émigré, his subjective experience. And it is so eloquent about it because González permeates the form (the expressive handling of photography, the punctual knotting of audios and images) with his emotional state: that disconnection with the place where he now lives that shakes/impacts his being. Parole is a film of the sensations that its author experiences after having tried to leave behind a world from which he ultimately cannot detach himself, a world that he always carries with him.
Parole" es un "archivo de sentimientos" con el que el realizador cubano Lázaro González canaliza la incertidumbre de miles de migrantes que buscan reunirse con sus familias. "Es una película sobre la espera"
In “Cuban Cinema Without Borders” González wants to "show a sort of rebirth of Cuban cinema despite the pandemic, the economic, political and social crisis that exists in Cuba. A cinema that more consciously seeks to circumvent censorship, that is more politically committed without fearing the consequences of having a critical look at the national reality. There is a common thread that connects very well the desire of these films to respond to a lack of freedom of expression and political persecution with very creative solutions,” he says.
"In a sense, Sexile picks up where a film like Mauvaise Conduite (1983) leaves off. As generations have passed, with Sexile, González continues to recover the life stories of those queer individuals who fled Cuba for the US in 1980s. Drawing on personal archives, oral histories and ephemeral materials, González constructs a counter-archive that challenges the erasure of queer experiences from official narratives...Ultimately, Sexile serves as both a historical intervention and a poetic homage, bridging the past and future of Cuban queer diasporic identity while advocating for a more inclusive understanding of the Mariel exodus and its enduring legacy"
"Parole is an intimate short documentary by Cuban filmmaker Lázaro González González. Filmed in the United States it reflects on his own journey of exile, where a mother and son cling to fragmented digital messages as their only lifeline. A tender, raw, and unforgettable story of love across distance."
"In his debut film, MASKS, Cuban filmmaker Lázaro J. González takes an anthropological approach to documenting Margot and Roxana. We watch Ríubel Alarcón and Pedro Manuel González, in their respective cities of Havana and Santa Clara, as they go through the process of transforming themselves for the stage while discussing their personal evolutions, the fight for equality and respect and the trials and dangers that lie ahead."