David Farnor | On 11, Jun 2020

Netflix will release Olivier Assayas’ latest film, Wasp Network, this June, and a new trailer gives us a first look at the star-studded drama.

Starring Penelope Cruz, Edgar Ramírez, Gaël Garcia Bernal, Ana De Armas and Wagner Moura, the film is set in 90s Cuba, where a group of defectors start a spy network. Their mission? To infiltrate violent anti-Castroist organizations responsible for terror attacks on the island.

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 aka. 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 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, the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019, before being snapped up by Netflix for distribution. It premieres on Netflix worldwide on 19th June. Here’s the trailer:

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