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Most feature films and documentaries produced during the revolution
owe a large debt to the government-funded El Instituto Cubano de las
Artes e Industrias Cinematográficas (ICAIC), or the Cuban Institute
of Cinematographic Art and Industry, founded in 1959. With the
establishment of its production and posting facilities, film
laboratory, training programmes, distribution arm and archive, a
dynamic and prolific film community began to flourish. In the
Sixties and Seventies, Cuban filmmakers -- including Tomás Gutiérrez
Alea, Santiago Alvarez, Humberto Solás, Sergio Giral, Sara Gómez, and
Pastor Vega -- set high standards and succeeded in holding a mirror
up to the dramatic social and political changes profoundly affecting
their country. Over the years, the stability of ICAIC also provided
production facilities and a haven for Latin American filmmakers
working in exile or under politically oppressive regimes. And
historically, ICAIC's support of emerging filmmakers has contributed
to the growth of indigenous cinemas throughout the world.
Cuban filmmakers involved with ICAIC have, for the most part, balanced their personal artistic expression with a sense of commitment to the revolution. By claiming a surprisingly strong intellectual autonomy from the government, they have produced films that maintain a questioning and critical attitude. (It's worth noting that the Cuban government charged the armed forces with the duty of producing the "official" propaganda films.) The political undertones of Cuban cinema are never far from the surface. Sometimes comedy, farce and satire are used to defuse stinging critiques or simply to get people to laugh at patterns of behaviour they might recognize in themselves. Other times filmmakers express their ideas in the form of serious meditations, allegorical stories, or examinations of historical periods that stand in sharp contrast to contemporary social mores. But consistently, we find Cuban artists commenting on the range of societal problems: bureaucratic red-tape, housing shortages, the status of women in society, racial tensions, and class divisions. Their films have a wonderful sense of immediacy and vibrancy that speaks to the very real and tangible day-to-day quality of life during the revolution. Regrettably, the number of films produced in Cuba has decreased during the Nineties due to the country's financial state (worsened by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the U.S. embargo). In an effort to compensate for the decreased levels of state support, filmmakers now seek international co-productions (Spain, Italy, Mexico, France and Germany) in order to produce their films. by Ramiro Puerta, Toronto International Film Festival.Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea died in 1996 at the age of 67, after a four-year battle with lung cancer, but not before enjoying renewed international attention late in his career with the art-house successes of Strawberry and Chocolate (1993) and Guantanamera (1995), two films he co-directed with Juan Carlos Tabío. A revolutionary talent known for his innovative, incisive, ideologically committed, and stylistically eclectic approach to filmmaking, Alea had long been recognized as "Cuba's greatest director" (Dennis West). Active since the 1960s, he fashioned a formally daring, politically sophisticated, sometimes stingingly satirical, often surprisingly comic body of work which displayed a committed revolutionary's concern for the precise social and historical contexts governing the lives of individuals -- and which did not shied away from the stresses and strains of Cuba's post- revolutionary society. Alea was a member of the rebel film unit attached to Castro's guerillas, and is credited with directing the first dramatic feature to emerge from post-revolutionary Cuba (1960's Stories of the Revolution). He burst into international prominence in the late 1960s with such works as Death of a Bureaucrat (1966) and Memories of Underdevelopment (1968). The latter was the first feature from post-revolutionary Cuba to be released in the U.S., and it left American critics simply stunned; they lavished it with some of the most enthusiastic praise ever accorded a foreign film in the U.S., and could scarcely believe that such a work could have been produced in Castro's Cuba. It remains one of the great masterpieces of Latin American cinema. The Elephant and the Bicycle (El elefante y la bicicleta)Juan Carlos Tabio is responsible for some of contemporary Cuban cinema's most sparkling social satires, including the hilarious hit comedy Plaff! (see July 10 & 11) and two recent collaborations with the late, great Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Strawberry and Chocolate (see July 18 & 19) and Guantanamera. The Elephant and the Bicycle is Tabío's latest, a sprightly revolutionary fable set in 1925 on an island off the Cuban coast. When an ex-con returns home to the island with a movie projector and a print of Robin Hood, the locals flock to take in the new experience of cinema. With repeated viewings, however, the film begins to take on new meaning for the mesmerized islanders; it transforms before their eyes into a drama in which they, the downtrodden underdogs, rise up against the nasty capitalists, represented by the island's unpopular landowner. And before long revolution is in the air. . . The title refers to a scene in which children argue over the shape of a cloud in the sky -- is it an elephant or a bicycle? Cuba 1995. Director: Juan Carlos Tab o. Cast: Luis Alberto Garc a, Lilian Vega, Martha Farre. Colour, 35mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 85 mins.Plaff! (or Too Afraid of Life) (Plaf! - Demasiado miedo a la vida)Una comedia de suspense. Viejas practicas de brujeria cubana le hacen la vida imposible a Concha Ronda. Quien tira los huevos asesinos contra su casa? La vecina que años atras le codiciara el marido? El amante para lograr sus fines? La nuera para quedarse con la casa? Siete sospechosos se suceden, pero la solucion no aparecera hasta el final. Direccion: Juan Carlos Tabio. Con: Daisy Granados, Thais Valdes y Luis Alberto Garcia. Juan Carlos Tabío's wickedly funny hit comedy has been hailed as "the best Cuban film this decade" (Variety) and "a raucous contemporary satire which lampoons all things Cuban, from the socialist bureaucracy to santería" (David Cook). Plaff!'s onomatopoeic title refers to the sound an egg makes when hitting a house; its protagonist is widowed Concha (Daisy Granados), whose life takes an unhappy turn when her brawny son weds brainy, modern-minded Clarita, an engineer with strong opinions. Suddenly, Concha just can't seem to get along with anyone. Suddenly, regularly, her house is being pelted with eggs. Meanwhile, her attempts to use santéria (Cuba's African-based religion) to undermine her son's marriage don't seem to be doing the trick. Tabío takes pointed shots at race, sex, family, government and other sacred cows, and heightens the hilarity by mocking the filmmaking process itself; intentionally sloppy edits, overexposed shots, camera crew visible in mirrors, and other obvious "gaffes" spoof the supposed shortcomings of Third World cinema. "From the minute the projector rolls, it is obvious Plaff! is an original venture" (Variety). "A quirky, funny film that is packed with surprises. . . vigorously played by a cast led by the magnificent Granados" (Bloomsbury). Cuba 1988. Director: Juan Carlos Tab o. Cast: Daisy Granados, Thais Valdés, Luis Alberto García. Colour, 35mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 92 mins. Adorable Lies (Adorables mentiras)Gerardo Chijona's Adorable Lies is "a playful, outrageous and exuberant first feature. . . in the unparalleled Cuban tradition of enchanting filmmaking" (Helga Stephenson, Toronto I.F.F.). Mixing melodrama and black comedy in a manner reminiscent of Pedro Almodóvar, the film traces the ups and downs of a love affair between two people who have adopted false personae in order to escape the mundane reality of their lives. Unemployed, would-be screenwriter Jorge Luis meets beautiful Sissy at a film premiere. In order to impress her, he claims to be a director looking for an new actress. Harbouring screen dreams of her own, she in turn invents a suitably glamorous identity with which to impress him. Both give false names, both neglect to mention that they're married -- and complicated romance ensues as each falls passionately in love with the mythical personae of the other. Adorable Lies was made with help from Spanish TV and Robert Redford's Sundance Institute, and ran into censorship problems which delayed its release at home. "A frank look at life in Cuba, where fantasy can be more appealing than the reality of scarce food and cramped apartments" (Variety). "[A] quirky directorial debut. . continuing the great tradition of Cuban comedy [like] Plaff!" (Vancouver I.F.F.). Cuba 1992. Director: Gerardo Chijona. Cast: Isabel Santos, Luis Alberto García, Mirtha Ibarra, Thais Valdés. Colour, 35mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 100 mins. Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesarrollo)Un hombre atrapado entre dos mundos. Cuba, 1962.Sergio un intelectual burgues, ve partir a su familia hacia Estados Unidos. Al quedarse solo, intenta analizar los vertiginosos acontecimientos sociales que lo rodean: La ficcion, el teatro libre y la epoca convulsa de la "crisis de los misiles",se reunen en esta inolvidable pelicula. Interpretes: Sergio Corrieri, Daisy Granados y Eslinda Nuñez. Premiado en numerosos festivales internacionales. "An amazing movie" (Chicago Sun Times), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's masterpiece is one of the most celebrated and discussed works of Third World and Latin American cinema, and certainly one of the finest films to ever emerge from Cuba. Based on a novel by Edmundo Desnoes, Memories unfolds as the diary of one Sergio, a politically ambivalent, sexually neurotic, bourgeois liberal intellectual who opts to stay behind in revolutionary Cuba when his family flees for Miami in 1961. Sergio's sceptical reflections on pre- and post- revolutionary Cuba are interwoven with documentary footage of the era's major historical events (the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, speeches by Kennedy), and with a daring array of self-reflexive techniques (appearances by Alea and novelist Desnoes, as themselves; clips from pornography). The result is an intriguing, ironic, insightful, and highly innovative examination of the role of the intellectual in a revolutionary society -- and a fascinating portrait of an alienated individual unable to commit himself politically. In 1973 Memories became the first feature from Castro's Cuba to be released in U.S., where its subtlety and sophistication left critics dumbfounded. It turned up on the New York Times' "10 Best&wuot; list for the year, was given a special citation by the National Society of Film Critics for "outstanding cinematic achievement," and was later voted "Best Third World Film of the Decade" in a 1977 survey of major critics. It remains " a fascinating achievement. . . wise, sad and often funny . . . hugely effective" (Vincent Canby). " Simply one of the finest examples of revolutionary Cuban cinema" (John Mraz). Cuba 1968. Director: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Cast: Sergio Corrieri, Daisy Granados, Eslinda Nuñez. B&W, 16mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 97 mins. The Survivors (Los Sobrevivientes)Dedicated to Luis Buñuel, and recalling the great surrealist's The Exterminating Angel, this rarely-seen, darkly comic allegory from Cuban master Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, well-known director of Memories of Underdevelopment and Strawberry and Chocolate, traces the fate of one aristocratic family in the aftermath of Castro's revolution. The Orozco clan is shocked by the turn of events, but doesn't believe that the new political situation will last. While their wealthy friends flee to the United States, they decide to wait things out, holed up in their mansion and isolated from the chaos outside. As years pass and their food stocks diminishes, they cling stubbornly to their discreet charm of their outdated bourgeoisie ways, but gradually regress through ever-more primitive forms of social order, from capitalism to feudalism to slavery to savagery and worse. "Events take an ever more grotesque turn, with plentiful moments of black humour. . . Survivors is a carefully thought out metaphor in which nothing is left to chance. . . [and] is close to Buñuel's idiosyncrasy" (Variety). Cuba 1979. Director: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Cast: Enrique Santisteban, Reinaldo Miravalles, Germán Pinelli, Ana Viña. Colour, 35mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 130 mins. The Last Supper (La ultima cena)Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's The Last Supper is a caustic, anti-religious social satire in the best Buñuelian mode, set on a Cuban sugar plantation in the late 18th century, and based on an actual historical incident. During Easter, the plantation owner, a pious, guilt-ridden Count, decides on a half-cocked gesture of Christian charity: he will reenact the Last Supper, with 12 black slaves as the apostles, and himself as Christ. When the religious role-playing gets drunkenly out of hand, the result is a slave rebellion -- and it is time for property ownership to reassert its place of precedence in the scheme of things. "The film's centrepiece is the extraordinary last supper presided over by the Count, who begins by washing and kissing the feet of the 12 slaves while each, in turn, giggles and panics at the lunatic behaviour of the master" (Vincent Canby, New York Times). "A dazzling moral fable . . . Alea is brilliant in disbelief" (Penelope Gilliat). "A brilliant Godardian parable. . . This complex indictment of religious hypocrisy and cultural colonisation reflects the same subtlety as Alea's earlier Memories of Underdevelopment" (Lynda Miles, Time Out). Cuba 1976. Director: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Cast: Nelson Villagra, Silvano Rey, Luis Alberto García. Colour, 35mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 110 mins. Strawberry and Chocolate (Fresa y chocolate)A wonderful return to comic form for Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Cuba's greatest director, Strawberry and Chocolate has proven to be one of the most popular foreign films of the 1990s. Co-directed by Juan Carlos Tabio , the film offers a wry, redemptive, generous take on gay-straight relations in contemporary Cuba, a country that has drawn criticism for its intolerance of homosexuality; Alea said that he hoped Strawberry and Chocolate would provide "a more complex image of our country, where you can see that homosexuals are discriminated against, as everywhere, but that it is a process and things change." David (Vladimir Cruz), a sociology student, is an upright, uptight, homophobic communist; Diego (Jorge Perugorría) is older, opinionated, cosmopolitan, funny, full of life, and openly gay. A chance encounter between the two leads to a fascinating, highly fraught friendship, with Diego very attracted to handsome David, and David duty-bound to expose his new pal as a counterrevolutionary. "To call this new film by Alea ground-breaking doesn't nearly do it justice: for Cuba, it's off the political seismic scale. . . One of the most human and deeply felt love stories of the year" (New York F.F.). "A gem. . . the international breakthrough film for Cuban cinema" (David Stratton, Variety). Cuba/Mexico/Spain 1993. Director: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Juan Carlos Tabío. Cast: Jorge Perugorría, Vladimir Cruz, Mirta Ibarra, Francisco Gatorno. Colour, 35mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 110 mins. A Successful Man (Un hombre de exito)Historia de una ambicion. Un apuesto joven se vale de su capacidad de seduccion y carencia de escrupulos para alcanzar las mas altas metas en la vida. Una apasionante pelicula de intriga y traicion, en medio de los ambientes mas refinados.Direccion: Humberto Solas. Con: Raquel Revuelta y Daisy Granados. An epic chronicle of thirty years of Cuban politics and history, A Successful Man has been compared to The Godfather for its lavish period re-creation. Directed by Humberto Solás, whose earlier Lucia is perhaps the epic spectacular of the Cuban cinema, the film contrasts "the lives of two brothers separated by ideology and ambition. The tale begins in the thirties with the brothers in school and the future full of promise. It soon becomes apparent that Javier, thirsting for power and consumed by ambition, is totally lacking in scruples and will do anything to serve his own ends. Dario, an idealist whose middle-class origins do not curb his longing for revolution, refuses the temptation to sell out even if it means losing the woman he loves to his detested brother. This story of corruption versus innocence and purity of right is blessed with Solás' meticulous attention to detail. Havana, replete with all the trappings of bourgeois opulence, is reconstructed time and again to recreate periods from 1932 to the beginning of the Cuban revolution, while hundreds of impeccably costumed extras add the finishing touches. . . By one of Cuba's top directing talents, [A Successful Man] is an ambitious venture" (Vancouver I.F.F.). Cuba 1986. Director: Humberto Solás. Cast: César Evora, Rachel Revuelta, Daisy Granados. Colour, 35mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 110 mins. Queen and King (Reina y Rey)Directed by Cuban veteran Julio Garcia Espinosa, Queen and King is a sweet fable about an elderly woman and her devoted dog in contemporary Havana, laced with just enough social and political bite concerning daily privation in Cuba. . . Queen (Consuelo Vidal), a retired servant, lives in a spacious house left by her employers when they split for Miami 20 years earlier. A widow, she keeps the place spic'n'span with the help of her dog, King, who helps her make the bed before accompanying her on fanciful walks to the beach and day-dreaming excursions to an abandoned rail car. But times are hard. The local butcher no longer has scraps for King, and the wily pooch starts looking elsewhere for sustenance. Charming comic interludes comment on the social and material realities of trying to sort out one's allegiances and provide for loved ones in today's Cuba. [The film's] pleasant score and expressive location lensing augment the tender complicity between the woman and her dog. Vidal's sterling central performance won her a best actor trophy at the Amiens festival" (Lisa Nesselson, Variety). Cuba/Spain/Mexico 1994. Director: Julio García Espinosa. Cast: Consuelo Vidal, Capuli, Coralia Veloz. Colour, 35mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 90 mins.Death of a Bureaucrat (La muerte de un burócrata)A blackly comic, slyly surreal satirical attack on Cuba's Kafkaesque bureaucracy, Death of a Bureaucrat was the first Tomás Gutiérrez Alea film to gain international attention, and is often cited as the breakthrough work of the startlingly creative new Cuban cinema of the 1960s. After a model worker is killed in an industrial accident, he is buried clutching his union card, as a symbol of proletarian pride and solidarity. When his wife goes to apply for her widow's pension, however, she learns that it can't be processed without the card. When she further learns that there is a law prohibiting exhumation within two years of burial, the stage is set for some outrageous skullduggery. Alea pays madcap tribute to the likes of Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and Harold Lloyd along the way, and there are nods in the direction of Buñuel, Bergman, Kurosawa, Welles, and Vigo as well; "it is to Alea's credit that [these numerous hommages] become integral to this inventive narrative" (Bloomsbury). The film won a Special Jury Prize at the Karlovy Vary fest in Czechoslovakia. "[An] arresting early work by one of Cuba' foremost film-makers. . . It's a surprising piece to have been made in the Cuba of the mid-60s, but the laughs come as much from a Buñuelian sense of absurdity as they do from any outright criticism of Castro's regimeñ" (Time Out). Cuba 1966. Director: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Cast: Salvador Wood, Silvia Planas, Manuel Estanillo. B&W, 16mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 85 mins. Santiago Alvarez (1919-1998): Five FilmsOne of world cinema's most adventurous and inventive documentary filmmakers, and one of Cuba's most important film artists, Santiago Alvarez died in May of this year, at the age of 79. Alvarez was never formally trained as filmmaker, and didn't make his first film until he was forty. His aesthetically audacious, rhythmically compelling early documentaries catapulted him to the very forefront of Castro-led Cuba's new cinema, and brought him widespread international attention and acclaim. Making remarkable use of newsreel and archival footage, still photos, magazine cut-outs, animation, and elaborate musical and audio accompaniment, Alvarez's dynamic works display the same cutting-edge fascination and facility with montage (in all its many varieties) as the early revolutionary cinema of Soviet Union. "Propagandist extraordinaire and one of the finest documentary filmmakers to have ever held a camera in his hands, Santiago Alvarez has made films that are kinetically exciting, formally innovative, intellectually rigorous, and emotionally satisfying." -- Toronto Festival of Festivals. "He commandeered every different documentary genre, from the pamphlet to satire, by way of the reportage of war. . . Alvarez amalgamated creative kleptomania with the skills of a bricoleur to reinvent Soviet montage in a Caribbean setting." -- Michael ChananLBJ, one of Alvarez's most famous films, is a stunning anti- imperialist, anti-American satire which exemplifies the director's "nervous montage" technique. (1968. B&W, 35mm. 18 mins.) The Forgotten War / La guerra olvidada is a shot-in-Laos reflection on the American saturation bombing of that Southeast Asian country. (1969. B&W, 35mm. 19 mins.) Maputo: The Ninth Meridian / Maputo: meridiano novo explores Mozambique's struggle for independence from Portugal. (1970. Colour, 35mm. 16 mins.) How, Why and for What is a General Assassinated? / Cómo, por qué y para qué se asesina un general? investigates the murder of General Rene Schneider, head of the Chilean armed forces, who was shot shortly after Salvador Allende's electoral victory in 1970. (1971. Colour, 35mm. 36 mins.) Take Off at 18:00 Hours / Despegue a las 18:10, an impressionistic look at Cuba's mass battle against underdevelopment, is "one of the finest documentaries ever made. . . a veritable firecracker of a film, using every tool of the medium to communicate its message" (Toronto Festival of Festivals). (1969. B&W, 35mm. 41 mins.) LuciaTres mujeres: Tres epocas. Tres cuentos de amor. El romanticismo del siglo XIX y una mujer acosada por la guerra y la traicion; el encanto de loa años treinta y una muchacha que se debate entre la pasion y la muerte en medio de una convulsa situacion politica; los años sesenta y una joven campesina que defiende sus derechos frente a los celos enfermizos de su esposo. Dos historias memorables y una comedia antologica. Com Raquel Revuelta y Ramon Brito. One of the most ambitious films ever made in Cuba -- it reputation as the Gone With the Wind of Cuban cinema probably understates its achievement and importance -- Humberto Solás's sweeping, spectacular three-part epic recounts Cuba's century-long struggle for liberation through the stories of three woman, each named Lucía, living in three crucial periods of Cuban history. Each episode is told in its own distinctive visual and narrative style. In the first, a Visconti- like tragedy set in the 1890s, a landed aristocrat is betrayed by her Spanish lover during Cuba's war for independence from Spain. In the second, a melodrama in vintage Hollywood mode, a middle-class divorcée becomes involved with a young revolutionary during the abortive uprising against Cuban dictator Machado in the 1930s. In the third, a comedy in the 60s style of the French nouvelle vague, an agricultural worker on a collective farm struggles with illiteracy and a macho husband. Panoramic, probing, and more than a little pointed in its sexual politics, Lucía won wide praise (and numerous international honours) for its formal and thematic audacity, and was hailed by feminist critics as "a new kind of women's movie. . . one of the wittiest, most sympathetic statements on the inequality suffered by omen" (Marjorie Rosen). "Easily the finest film to come out of Cuba in the '60s. . . way ahead of its time in linking sexual and political repression" (Jan Dawson, Time Out). "An exhilarating experience. . . the film is a knock-out" (American Film Institute). Cuba 1969. Director: Humberto Solás. Cast: Raquel Revuelta, Eslinda Nuñez, Adela Legrá. B&W, 16mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 160 mins. One Way or Another (De cierta manera)The first feature film made by a woman in Cuba -- a woman who also happened to be one of Cuba's only black filmmakers -- Sara Gómez's One Way or Another is a landmark, genre-bending take on race, class and, paramountly, gender under the Cuban revolution. Mixing old- fashioned, different-side-of-the-tracks romance with radical Godardian interventions, the film charts the relationship between Yolanda, a middle-class school teacher, and Mario, a factory worker. She's committed to Cuba's new political and social order, and eager to establish a new order in her personal life as well. He's mired in outmoded machismo and misogyny, and used to having things his own way. Gómez subverts their fictional love story with cinéma vérité and agitprop devices (newsreel footage, interviews, voice-overs, direct addresses) which explore the vestiges of old-fashioned racism and sexism in Cuba. Her previous documentary work had established her as one of the leading luminaries of Third World and feminist cinema; she died, tragically, of acute asthma during the post- production of One Way of Another. The film was eventually completed for released by directors Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Julio García Espinosa. "One of the most important films to have been made in Cuba. . . [and] one of the most intimate" (Toronto I.F.F.). "Remarkable. . . brilliant" (Time Out). Cuba 1974/77. Director: Sara Gómez. Cast: Yolanda Cuellar, Mario Balmaceda, Mario Limonta. B&W, 16mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 79 mins. Up to a Certain Point (Hasta cierto punto)A barbed look at sex and class in post-revolutionary Cuba, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Up to a Certain Point is something of a tribute to and continuation of Sara Gómez's One Way or Another, a film Alea help complete after Gómez's untimely death. Up to a Certain Point (the film's Spanish-language title, Hasta cierto punto, deliberately echoes that of Gómez's feature, De cierta manera) concerns self- deluded Oscar, a successful playwright married to an actress. Oscar is at work on his first screenplay, on the lingering presence of Latin-style machismo in progressive, supposedly egalitarian Cuba. To research the subject, he begins conducting interviews with male and female workers at the Havana docks -- and finds himself falling in love with liberated Lina, a beautiful young dockworker. When Oscar and Lina embark on an affair, it quickly becomes apparent that, under his liberated veneer, Oscar is pretty much mired in tired old machismo himself. The drama is intercut with actual video interviews with Cuban workers, one of whom declares that women should be free, "up to a certain point"; Alea saves his sharpest barbs for quasi- bourgeois intellectuals and bohemians like Oscar (and like Alea himself), with their preconceived notions about the proletariat. "As in his earlier films, Gutiérrez Alea brings a dynamic, visceral approach to his material, endowing it with startling immediacy. Up to a Certain Point hovers between a pointed social critique and a general lament for the human condition" (Richard Peña). "Alea wields his arguments with the lightest touch and a great sensitivity. . . and uses the same cruising camera technique that served him so well in Memories of Underdevelopment" (Enrique Fernández, Village Voice). Cuba 1983. Director: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Cast: Oscar Alvarez, Mirta Ibarra, Omar Valdés, Coralia Veloz. Colour, 16mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 88 mins. The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin (Las aventuras de Juan Quin Quin)Hailed as revolutionary Cuba's first feature-length comedy, Julio García Espinosa's picaresque, parodic and hugely popular adventure film offers a giddily inventive mix of classic movie genres and styles: war, Western, slapstick, musical, gangster, Buñuelian satire, Soviet-style Socialist Realism, and more. The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin is set in pre-revolutionary Cuba, where the flim-flam, jack-of-all-trades hero lives by his wits and ekes out an existence as, variously, a farmer, altar boy, bullfighter, and circus act (as Jesus on the cross, no less). Godardian intertitles, animated sequences, and comic strips further enliven the anarchic proceedings. An encounter with cartoonish imperialists ultimately turns the hero into an anti-government guerilla. Director Espinosa conceived of the film as an accommodation between "serious" and "popular" art, as an attempt to combine movie entertainment with a subversive critique of old forms of movie entertainment. The result was one of the most widely seen films in Cuban history. "Irresistible and irrepressible. . . The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin is entertaining and accessible while engaging directly the politics of revolution and the politics of cinema" (Toronto I.F.F.). "Gives anarchic comedy a whole new dimension" (Michael Chanan). "Far-fetched fun. . . [a] charming guerilla-style spoof" (Marjorie Rosen). Cuba 1967. Director: Julio García Espinosa. Cast: Julio Martínez, Erdwin Fernández, Adelaida Raymat. B&W, 35mm, in Spanish with English subtitles. 113 mins. I Am Cuba (Soy Cuba / Ja Kuba)"A classic. . . absolutely astonishing. I Am Cuba is that rarity of rarities -- a genuine hidden treasure. It puts to shame anything we're doing today" (Martin Scorsese). This astounding Soviet-Cuban artifact from the early 1960s was supposed to be Cuban cinema's answer to Eisenstein's Potemkin and Godard's Breathless, but was mocked by locals as I Am Not Cuba, and shelved for many years. Recently rediscovered and released in North America as a Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese presentation, it has been lavished with extravagant critical praise, all pivoting around one central point: I Am Cuba is one of the most amazingly visual films ever made. A collaboration between ICAIC, Cuba's state-run film agency, and three major Soviet talents -- director Mikhail Kalatozov (The Cranes Are Flying), cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, and poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko -- the film unfolds as a series of up-the-revolution folk tales designed to reveal the decadence of Batista's pre-Communist Cuba. But, wow! -- decadence has scarcely looked more gloriously sensual or seductive. Urusevsky's giddy, gravity-defying sequence shots led one wag to suggest that the film had been shot in "GyroScope." Another opined that the poor Soviets, escaping austere Moscow, had obviously fallen under the spell of Cuba's "sex, sunshine, freedom from restraint. . . I Am Cuba is the first, and perhaps the only, work of Communist decadence" (David Denby). "Visually staggering. . . Taken as either historical footnote or a mad aesthetic flight, I Am Cuba is remarkable" (Dennis Harvey, Variety). "A feverish pas de deux of Eastern European soulfulness and Latin sensuality. . . it suggests Eisenstein filtered through La Dolce Vita with an Afro-Cuban pulse" (New York Times). Cuba/USSR 1964. Director: Mikhail Kalatozov. Cast: Luz María Collazo, José Gallardo, Raúl García, Sergio Corrieri. B&W, 35mm, in Spanish and Russian with English subtitles. 141 mins.
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