COOCUYO. To quote a Cuban comedian: “where does the Cocuyo hide its battery?”, just thanks to its peculiarity, Desiderio uses this cockroach as a perfect metaphor to describe his protagonists: with their green lights during the night and virtually impossible to find during the day. In his movie, he tries to find the battery of the Cocuyo living and looking for the “day-time” part, creating a path made by portraits and with an anti-narrative style. These scenes are far away from the Electronic music, or partly at least; all in a very natural context and without a defined screenplay. coocuyo.com 

 

The Electronic Music Official Portal of Cuba presents “Coocuyo”, a movie by the Italian artist Desiderio. After his first feature film, “Ahora si llego!” (Rodaggio Film, 2015), with him depicted asthe main character riding a second-world-war Russian sidecar across all Cuban provinces, Desiderio works on a new project about the world of Electronic Music and its protagonists. Coocuyo is the coming together of more than one reality, where the author is an art director of web platforms on one side, and the director of the movie from the other side. coocuyo.com (network), for its peculiarities, stands for the keystone in Cuba, with more than 50 Cuban Djs/producers and their music, starting from the house, techno until drum ‘n bass music (with releases, podcasts, news, events, videos etc.) This platforms keeps growing and among its protagonists international artists can be found, such
as Major Lazer (Diplo) during his concert in La Havana (2016) with more than 400.000 people.

The idea is to talk about the Cocuyos* (a cockroach with a couple of lights above its head, that lives only in Cuba) as an Electronic Music trend, which is trying to pinpoint its own identity and opening to the international electronic music stage at the same time.The movie is made not as a promotion of the single artist, but in the author’s way, presented as an“Artistic trend”, trying to stay away from documentaries already done in the past about this phenomenon (with interviews, reportages).

To quote a Cuban comedian: “where does the Cocuyo hide its battery?”, just thanks to its
peculiarity, Desiderio uses this cockroach as a perfect metaphor to describe his protagonists: with
their green lights during the night and virtually impossible to find during the day.
In his movie, he tries to find the battery of the Cocuyo living and looking for the “day-time” part, creating a path made by portraits and with an anti-narrative style. These scenes are far away from the Electronic music, or partly at least; all in a very natural context and without a defined screenplay. The challenge is to present Electronic music without music, or going even close to a documentary, with a style that goes between Sagro GRA by Gianfranco Rosi and Scanner Darkly by Richard Linklater.