Main content

Skip to main content

The Abattoir

View on the Pragda STREAM site

The Abattoir is a raw and intimate portrait of life in the margins of contemporary Cuba. Set in a crumbling state-built housing project, the film follows two young men—Daniel, a pig farmer, and Fernando, an aspiring filmmaker—who dream of escaping both their neighborhood and the country. Though their paths differ, they are united by a sense of frustration, disillusionment, and unrealized potential.

Through a hybrid of documentary realism and narrative storytelling, director Fernando Fraguela Fosado explores the emotional and existential toll of entrapment in a decaying system. As Daniel tends to pigs amid daily struggles and Fernando turns his camera on the bleak surroundings, their parallel stories reveal a Cuba rarely seen—one defined not by revolution or resilience, but by stagnation, isolation, and the quiet yearning for freedom.

The Abattoir is a powerful meditation on youth, inertia, and the haunting realization that escape may be as elusive as hope itself.

Related Films

Calls from Moscow

An apartment in Moscow becomes the stage for one day in the lives of four…

Tania Libre

In a fascinating and novel approach, Lynn Hershman Leeson allows us to…

On the Starting Line

This intimate family chronicle, seen from the perspective of two women,…