Canada, Cuba, 2023
Directed by Pedro Ruiz
In French and Spanish with English subtitles, 91 min
Cineforum
Thursday October 16, 2025, 6 PM
Centre for Social Innovation
The Eight Floor is a film between reality and excess. A hybrid work mixing autobiography and fiction, in the style of literary autofiction, about one of the most singular characters of the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ): Jacques Lanctôt.
The Eighth Floor chronicles the life of a man who returns to a place that welcomed and sheltered him during his exile in the 1970s: the eighth-floor room of the Hotel Nacional in Cuba. A sort of biopic of a memorable stay by a man in forced retirement, on a Caribbean island, in an enchanted castle where he could only live in fiery delirium.
The Eighth Floor es un viaje poético tras la huella de un hombre que revisita en recuerdos su exilio en Cuba; un viaje entre la realidad y el exceso de un antiguo miembro del Frente de liberación de Quebec; una narración que toma la forma de un regreso a la habitación del octavo piso del Hotel Nacional de La Habana, lugar en el que pasó casi cuatro años, en los años 1970, de su exilio.
