Lucía Malandro

After, Happiness is a feature-length essay documentary built from Cuba’s forgotten judicial archives, closed to the public for more than sixty years. In 2020, I accessed this fragile collection while researching my thesis, only to discover thousands of photographs that blurred the line between testimony and fiction. Among them were fototablas: visual reconstructions in which police forced criminals and victims to reenact crimes. These images were not neutral evidence but staged narratives designed to influence judges and shape official memory. At the heart of the film is Johny, the archivist who decides which files are preserved and which are destroyed—literally erasing or saving fragments of history. Through his voice, at once critical, delirious, and detective-like, the film guides the viewer through a labyrinth of images that expose how regimes fabricate the figure of the criminal, the witness, and the enemy of the state.The film is composed almost entirely of still photographs, in stark black-and-white, with a formal language that turns each frame into a suspended fragment of memory. By asking what it means to preserve, destroy, or reinterpret these images, After, Happiness reflects on the fragility of memory under authoritarianism and the power of archives to shape history and oblivion.