The restoration of Inside Downtown (2001), by Nicolás Guillén Landrián and Jorge Egusquiza Zorrilla, between painting and cinema.

This article examines *Inside Downtown* (2001), the final and only audio-visual work created in exile by Cuban filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián, highlighting its role in bridging his cinematic and painting practices. Produced in collaboration with Jorge Egusquiza Zorrilla in Miami, the documentary portrays the experiences of Cuban exiled artists and situates the artist’s studio as a space of refuge and resistance within a capitalist cityscape. The article also details the international, intergenerational restoration project "Decolonizing the Archive," which recovered and preserved *Inside Downtown* alongside Guillén Landrián’s earlier films, emphasizing the significance of restoration as both a collective and individual ritual of memory and identity. Through this lens, the work challenges previous critical perceptions of discontinuity in Guillén Landrián’s oeuvre and contributes to the broader Cuban diasporic and cinematic canon.