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.
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