The Companion

The film is set in Cuba in the nineteen eighties. The AIDS epidemic is at its height in those days. Horacio is a well known boxer in the country. He fails a drug test. As punishment he is posted to a sanatorium. Patients carrying HIV are confined there by law. Horacio is told to watch over one of them. The man is called Daniel. Daniel is brash and combative. He will not accept being shut in and wants out. Horacio, for his part, dreams of getting back to the ring. The two men collide from the start. As time passes another kind of bond forms between them. The film is about the compulsory confinement of that period. Yotuel Romero and Armando Miguel Gómez appear in the hundred and four minute film, a Panamanian, Cuban and Venezuelan co-production Pavel Giroud finished in 2016.