Wasp Network

Written & Directed by Olivier Assayas

Produced by Rodrigo Teixeira, Charles Gillibert, Lourenço Sant’Anna

Starring Penelope Cruz, Edgar Ramírez, Gaël Garcia Bernal, Ana De Armas, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Wagner Moura

Logline: Havana, early 90’s. Rene Gonzalez, a Cuban pilot, steals a plane and flees Cuba, leaving behind his beloved wife and daughter. He starts a new life in Miami. Other Cuban defectors soon follow and start a spy network. Their mission is to infiltrate violent anti-Castroist organizations responsible for terror attacks on the island.

Synopsis: René González (Edgar Ramírez) is a Cuban pilot who leaves his wife (Penelope Cruz) and young daughter behind in the communist island nation to defect to the United States and begin a new life of freedom in the early 1990s. But René is not the upstart American striver he appears to be. Joining forces with a group of Cuban exiles in South Florida known as the Wasp Network — led by undercover operative Manuel Viramontez a.k.a. Gerardo Hernandez (Gaël García Bernal) — he becomes part of a pro-Castro spy ring tasked with observing and infiltrating Cuban-American terror groups intent upon attacking the socialist republic.

Based on the true story of The Cuban Five — intelligence officers including González who were arrested in Florida in September 1998 and later convicted of espionage and other illegal activities — Wasp Network is a gripping and stylish political thriller that wears many faces, bringing together a rogue’s gallery of Cuban nationals and Cuban-American exiles engaged in a complex and deeply nuanced battle of competing ideologies and shifting loyalties.

Inspired by Fernando Morais’ book The Last Soldiers of the Cold War, writer-director Olivier Assayas (Carlos, Personal Shopper) gathers an ensemble cast including Penelope Cruz, Edgar Ramírez, Gaël Garcia Bernal, Ana De Armas, Leonardo Sbaraglia, and Wagner Moura for an explosive and urgent spy game fought in a hall of mirrors across neighboring states whose decades-long standoff casts shadows into the present day.