"Parole" Wins Best Short Film at LIFFY 2024

The documentary Parole (25 min.), directed by Cuban filmmaker Lázaro J. González, has won the Best Short Film award at the 2024 Latino and Iberian Film Festival at Yale (LIFFY), which took place from November 4-10. The jury praised the film for its poignant use of documentary cinema as a tool for self-discovery, stating: "This film weaves together lost family encounters, crosses verbal messages, and reveals a city that remains hidden, reflecting the vital tensions of the immigrant experience."

Parole tells the story of a mother’s WhatsApp messages connecting her with her son, who is exiled in San Francisco. The documentary, produced by Encuadre Films, with support of Berkeley Media Lab, explores the emotional weight carried by migrants, as the mother’s hope for reunification hinges on the fragile possibility of the humanitarian parole program under the Biden administration, a policy that benefited nationals of countries such as Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, but could now dissapear under the new US presidency.

The film, which had its premiere earlier this year at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley within the Eisner Competition Awards, has also been recently featured in the official competition of the 5th INSTAR Film Festival in the series Cuban Cinema without Borders, as well as the Seattle Latino Film Festival, San Francisco Latino Film Festival, among others. 

In the magazine Rialta, Cuban critic Ángel Pérez describes Parole as a deeply personal exploration of migration. “It does not represent; it is the experience of an émigré," Pérez writes. "And it is so eloquent because González imbues the form—through expressive photography, the careful stitching of audio and images—with the emotional state of disconnection. It is a vivid portrayal of the feeling of displacement and the struggle to leave behind a world that can never truly be shed.”

Through Parole, González offers an intimate, cinematic portrayal of the emotional and physical distance between the filmmaker and the world he once called home—capturing the ongoing presence of that world within him, even as he navigates life in exile.