Cuban Film Season for Auckland and Wellington

Si! Cuba! is a season of ten films celebrating forty years of film
production in Cuba. The Cuban films have been selected by the organisers
of the New Zealand Film Festival and will be presented in Auckland and
Wellington commencing late next month. The season is the second event in
the inaugural New Zealand-Cuba Film Exchange that began in February this
year with extensive New Zealand film programmes in Havana and Matanzas.

"ICAIC, Cuba’s film institute, opened their vaults to us and we have
selected ten films to illustrate the strength, diversity and changes that
have taken place in filmmaking during the Castro era. We’ll be showing
such classics as the historical epic Lucia to the recent hit Life is to
Whistle, a lyrical drama of life in contemporary Havana." says Film
Festival director, Bill Gosden.

AUCKLAND: The Academy, September 30 - October 13

WELLINGTON: The Paramount, October 7 - 20.

Programme details will be posted on the Film Festival website from Friday
(list of films below.)

Printed programmes available from September 9


Life is to Whistle
La vida es silbar
Director: Fernando Pérze (1999)

Combining surrealism, humour and insightful drama, Life Is To Whistle
alternates between the romantic mishaps of three troubled people living in
Havana: Mariana, a lusty young ballerina who takes a soon-to-be
regrettable vow of chastity to land a coveted role: Hunky musician
Elpidio, a modern-day buccaneer who steals the wallets and the hearts of
visiting tourists; and Julia, a sensitive social worker who literally
faints at the very mention of the word sex. Perez orchestrates their
separate searches for personal fulfilment with narrative agility, a sense
of the fantastic – he cites the painter Magritte as the presiding spirit
of his film – and a surprisingly gritty view of Havana on the cusp of the
new century. "The mix of fantasy and street realism is earthy and erotic;
sex and music underscore the entire film. It's a loving and gorgeous
portrait but the pieces of the puzzle don't always fit together. But maybe
that's as it should be. You won't find propaganda in Life Is to Whistle,
only one man's ambivalent feelings toward a mother country in an identity
crisis." – Sean Axmaker, Seattle Post

Lucía
Director: Humberto Sólas (1968)

One of the great films of the 60s from anywhere, Lucia was acclaimed
worldwide as the "Gone With The Wind of the Cuban film industry," and has
never really disappeared from the repertory of potent political drama.
Cuba's first film spectacular, it’s an epic, three-part feature
dramatizing three separate periods in the Cuban struggle for liberation in
order to show the participation of Cuban women in that fight. In 1895,
Lucia (Raquel Revuelta) is embroiled in a tale of love and betrayal during
Cuba's war for independence from Spain; in 1933, Lucia (Eslinda Nunez)
leaves her middle-class family and becomes involved in the overthrow of
the Cuban dictator Machado; and in the 1960s, Lucia (Adela Legra) is
taught how to read and write during Cuba's literacy campaign and, as a
newlywed, confronts her husband's macho attitudes. Each episode is filmed
in a distinctive visual style which translates the spirit of each
historical era, with the themes of love, death and war achieving epic
proportions. "To describe Lucia as a masterpiece seems almost to belittle
it… a monument of virtuoso filmmaking and a model of how to tell a
collective story in recognisably human terms" – Jan Dawson, Monthly Film
Bulletin

Plaff!
Demasiado miedo a la vida o Plaff
Director: Juan Carlos Tabío (1988)

"For Concha, the middle-aged protagonist of this lively if sardonic
comedy, life is a battle. Her baseball hero son has married the gorgeous
Clarita, a modern woman who seems more interested in scientific research
than in housekeeping or motherhood, and they’re living in Concha’s house.
What’s more, Concha is constantly pestered by the ardent, taxi-driving
José Ramón, always turning up with a bottle of wine and a hopeful gleam in
his eye. The very sight of her next door neighbour is a constant, taunting
reminder of her late husband’s infidelities – and somebody keeps throwing
eggs at her. Whenever Concha thinks she’s buttonholed the assailant – and
she suspects almost everybody – her accusation is interrupted by the
arrival of extenuating evidence: the next egg hits the wall. God himself
is against her. Plaff! – the title is the sound of a breaking egg –
comically undermines her direly negative attitude and it’s surprising just
how provocative the subversion of misery can seem… Robust, good-humoured
and quite astonishingly outspoken about the state of things in Cuba,
Plaff! is as informative as it is funny. — Bill Gosden, Wellington Film
Festival 1989

Memories of Underdevelopment
Memorias del Subdesarrollo
Director: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1968)

"The Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) was founded in 1959, only months after
Castro came to power. It was some years, however, before its fruits were
exposed to European and US audiences; Alea’s film, his fifth feature, was
the breakthrough. The story is related in the form of a diary by a
prosperous bourgeois who chooses to stay in Havana when his family leaves
for the states in 1961. While he rejects many of the bourgeois ideals of
his upbringing, he is unable to shake off either sexual neurosis or his
European-based intellectual paralysis, continuing to live uncertainly as a
rent-drawing property-owner. The ‘underdevelopment’ of the title is a
complex pun describing both individual and national problems of the
revolution in its infancy, though the film is anything but literary in its
attack: Alea proceeds with dazzling and highly accomplished technique
towards a perceptive and witty analysis." — Rod McShane, Time Out Film
Guide. "Sophisticated and cosmopolitan in style, fascinating in its
subtlety and complexity... a profound, noble film" --Peter Schjeldahl, New
York Times

The Last Supper
La ultima cena (1976)
Director: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1968)

Eight years after Memories… Alea once again found an international
audience with this startlingly black comedy, based on an actual incident
from 18th-century Cuban history. "Set in the last years of the 18th
century, it tells of an inevitably abortive attempt at paternalism by the
religious owner of a sugar plantation who, during Holy Week, attempts to
convince himself of his spiritual purity by performing acts of munificence
towards his slaves. He gathers together twelve of them, one of whom has
just had his ear cut off after an escape bid, for his own version of the
Last Supper, casting himself in the role of Christ-like benefactor. This
long sequence alone, during which he and the slaves talk and drink
themselves into stupor, is worthy of Bunuel himself not only in force of
argument but in its irony and humour. Good Friday, he proclaims, will be a
day of rest. But he has not informed his brutal overseer, who is then held
captive by the slaves to await confirmation of their master's
instructions. It is then that the system betrays its true colors… The film
is, quite simply, a masterwork of Latin-American cinema." – Derek Malcolm,
The Guardian

Maluala
Director: Sergio Giral (1979)

"Sergio Giral is the best known of the Black Cuban directors and his
previous films were historical observations of the period of slavery in
Cuba, the gradual rise of rebellion against colonial traditions, and the
ultimate freedom that resulted. Maluala is the most striking addition to
this genre. The action takes place during the last century in the region
of Maluala. Gallo, the black chieftain, together with his cohort, Coba,
present a petition for land and liberty to the colonial government.
Governor Escudero offers liberty if the rebellious villages will be
dismantled and their men offer themselves in surrender. He promises that
they will be freed shortly thereafter. Three chieftains agree, but Gallo
and Coba refuse…. Giral has mounted Maluala with colorful ritual and the
acting. Samuel Claxton, as Gallo, is highly stylized in the heroic
tradition. It is an absorbing adventure film wrought from historical
events which appear exotic and violent, but Giral constantly implants into
every image the necessity for unity among people in order to combat man's
seemingly casual desire to subjugate mankind, in the struggle for power
and undefined ambition." – San Francisco Film Festival, 1980

Portrait of Teresa
Retrato de Teresa
Director: Pastor Vega (1979)

That the Cuban woman is still struggling becomes abundantly clear in
Pastor Vega’s wry engaging Portrait of Teresa. Teresa is a pretty, capable
young Havana wife and mother who has been happily married for 11 years and
has three sons. Her husband Ramon is a TV repairman who is trying to study
to qualify for a promotion. Like couples in capitalist countries Teresa
and Ramon are struggling to make ends meet, so she works in a textile
factory. However, Teresa, who is bright and vivacious, clearly has
leadership abilities that emerge when she becomes an assistant director in
her union’s dance troupe… Ramon hits the ceiling, but Teresa has in fact
just gotten her first intoxicating whiff of freedom from domesticity. The
humour with which Vega tells of Teresa and Ramon’s clashes proves
deceptive as the picture gradually darkens. Yet this film is fair-minded,
capable of extending compassion to Ramon and rightly concerned with the
quality of family life but smart enough to realise that eventually nothing
is going to be the same for men – even machismo-obsessed Latin men.
Portrait is a film of much sunshine, quaint pastel cottages and driving
Latin rhythms, aspects which serve only to set up its culminating serious
impact. — Kevin Thomas, LA Times, 9/3/80

Vampires in Havana
Vampiros en La Habana
Director: Juan Padrón(1985)

"In a blatant bid for a piece of the international entertainment action,
Cuba unleashes a bawdy feature-length animation on the adventures of the
dead… Fast, brash and racy, Juan Padron’s opus is set in the politically
incorrect Cuba of 1933 and features a war between a consortium of European
vampires and their Chicago-based rivals. The two gangs converge on Havana,
where an expatriate vampire scientist has developed a wonder drug
(something like an eye-of-newt pina colada) allowing bloodsuckers immunity
from the sun… The tone is blithely grotesque…. Vampires is inhabited by
free-form potato-heads with big snouts, lolling tongues, snaggle-toothed
maws and insouciantly exaggerated racial or sexual characteristics…
There’s explicit (if stylised) sex, as well as an abundance of colourful
antisocial elements. Havana is a city of pisoirs, posadas, and
pastel-coloured nightlife – ot’s positivelt wholesome compated to the
blood-serving speakeasies of Chicago, but the Euro vamps have a hard time
finding a satisfactory meal. "No Cubans, please, they taste of sugar," one
protests. Ultimately they attack a gang of drunken tourists with broad
American accents." – J Hoberman, Village Voice.