We suport US Filmmaker Who Couldn't Participate in Cuban Festival

US filmmaker Katrina Browne wanted to participate in the Third Travelling Caribbean Cinema Showcase that ran from July 14 through the 16 but the Office of Foreign Assets Control(OFAC) denied her the license to travel to Cuba.
Browne expressed her interest into including her documentary Traces of the Trade along the 217 films that participate in this Festival, but when she went to pick her travel license she was told at the OFAC, the US Treasure Department’s office in charge of enforcing the US blockade against Cuba, that she will not receive it this time.
The movie maker was advised to apply for the license again and to wait 45 days to find out if OFAC would issue it. She expressed her disappointment at the news of her not being able to travel to Cuba to show her work and to discuss its future release on Cuban TV.
Browne is s direct descendant of Mark Anthony DeWolf, a pioneer of the slave trade in the Thirteen Colonies, and the documentary deals with the period between 1769 and 1820 when the DeWolf family had an active participation in this scourge.

In the film the author narrates the traffic as such and how the slaves were brought to Cuba from West Africa in the holds of merchant ships and here they were put to auction to later be taken to the northern country.
Last March, Browne exhibited Traces of Trade in the House of Africa in Havana during the visit of the Amistad schooner, a replica of a vessel by the same name where 53 slaves mutinied in 1839 after having departed from Havana on its way to the US.