In this unusual and inspiring film by Italian director Tommaso Santambrogio, the legendary Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz (whose first retrospective FILMADRID showed in 2015) is in Cuba teaching a film course. His guide and confidant is Gustavo, a taxi driver who has lived in Havana all his life. As they drive around the city, they share their visions of art, existence, and their intimate and collective pasts. It is then that the film dynamites its device and reinvents itself, opening itself to a lucid reflection on those wounds of history that are impossible to close, on the traces of colonialism and authoritarianism that remain all too vivid. Through precise compositions in lustrous black and white, Santambrogio captures the nuances of an unfathomable ethical and material darkness in a relentless portrait of the validity - albeit crouched in the shadows - of the eternal structures of power and oppression. Taxibol is the materialisation of an imaginative cinema that resists classification and discovers new narrative paths. A journey from kindness to cruelty, from the present to the bloodstained vestiges that still cloud the mind, in which we hear a speech that will never leave our memory: "Do you know what I will do? I'll shoot him in the head. I'll smash his head out. And I'll eat his brain. I'll eat his brain. That's a ritual that I'll do." JAVIER H. ESTRADA