Tag Archive for: Cuba

Coming soon – Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes (Cuba: Vivir entre ciclones)

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The Cuba we left behind when we finished shooting Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes in July came under renewed pressure from the North in September. Fresh sanctions by Washington on oil shipments from Venezuela plunged Cuba into a fuel crisis. There wasn’t enough petrol in the pumps. Friends in Havana told us that people were instructed to stay home if they live too far to walk in to work. There has been huge pressure on public transport. Priority was given to hospitals and food distribution. Now, as we finish editing, we are due for a short return trip to Cuba to screen a preview for our collaborators and obtain their feedback. It looks like getting around Havana will be even more difficult than usual, and whether we’ll be able to make it to the province, some five hours drive, is open to doubt, although other reports say things should improve during October.

Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes is a film is about the elements – hurricanes and rain, the sea and the earth. About a fishing port on the north coast of Cuba which has seen better days: Caibarién, where Hurricane Irma – one of the most powerful ever to sweep the Caribbean – made landfall on 17th September 2017.

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A film about ecology in Cuba

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Living Between Hurricanes is the title of a new documentary which I begin shooting this month in Cuba with Jean Stubbs and Jon Curry-Machado of the Commodities of Empire research project at the Institute of Latin American Studies. Funded by an AHRC Research Networks grant, the film explores the impact of a history of extreme weather events on the economy and the environment in and around a coastal community that was devastated by Hurricane Irma in 2017.

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Happy Birthday Santiago Alvarez

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Happy Birthday Santiago Alvarez

Born 18 March 1919, Havana
Died 20 May 1998, Havana

Santiago Alvarez was not speaking metaphorically when he said that the Revolution made him a filmmaker. Before the creation of Cuba’s revolutionary film institute in 1959 filmmaking in Cuba was sparse, and at the age of 40 Alvarez had never made a film, yet he quickly became the boldest of innovators in a decade notable for Cuba’s remarkable contribution to the aesthetic renewal of the medium. Put in charge of the weekly Noticiero (Newsreel), Alvarez reinvented the genre. Instead of an arbitrary sequence of disconnected items, in which the way the world is perceived is hindered by the fragmentation of the way it’s presented, he joined things up into a political argument, or turned them into single topic documentaries. He went on to transform every documentary genre he laid hands upon, from the compilation film to the travelogue, in an irrepressible frenzy of filmic bricolage licensed by that supreme act of bricolage, the Cuban Revolution. He excelled in the montage of found footage. Employing every kind of visual imagery, from newsreel to stills, movie clips to magazine cuttings, combined with animated texts and emblematic musicalisation, Alvarez amalgamated revolutionary politics and artistic kleptomania to reinvent Soviet montage in a Caribbean setting.

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Cuba: After the Burial

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A more interesting question to ask after his death is not what Fidel Castro was – a revolutionary hero? a tyrannical dictator? a beneficent dictator? – but who would now call themselves a Fidelista and what will become of Fidelismo? The Havana where I arrived the day before his burial at the other end of the island was certainly subdued, but how to interpret the silence that the TV news bulletins during the previous week had all remarked on? It wasn’t just that the authorities had banned music and alcohol during the mourning period. An old friend of my own age ruminated: ‘People were silent’, she said, ‘because they didn’t know what to say.’ Or as a new friend, an equally thoughtful young woman of 26 put it, ‘He already wasn’t there.’ Read more

Money Puzzles screens in Havana

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‘Money Puzzles’ will screen at the Havana International Film Festival 2016
in the section ‘Other Latitudes – Documentary Panorama’

Thursday 15 December, 8pm / Friday 16 December, 10am
Infanta Cinema 4

money-puzzles-havanaff

Fidel Castro 1926-2016

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No-one ever frightened the powers-that-be in Washington more than Fidel Castro. No-one ever challenged their hegemony more effectively, not just with his powerful rhetoric but above all in action, driving out a dictator and installing socialism ninety miles south of Florida. And no-one has ever been more vilified for doing so.

A revolution, he said, is not a bed of roses, and yes he made mistakes. Yes, the revolution he led dealt harshly with its enemies, but it was never Stalinist. It brought social justice, the best education and health systems in Latin America, the best example of international solidarity – above all for a country so small – and many other achievements, even though, yes, he sometimes misjudged economic reality.

His charisma was extraordinary and so was his intellect, and no-one was a more enthralling orator. I heard him speak twice. Once was a four-hour speech at a rally in the Plaza de la Revolución (I was grateful that as foreign guests we were given seats). The first half was about domestic affairs, and a lot of it passed me by, but I was riveted by the second half, the most penetrating analysis of international relations I had ever heard (or read). The second time was when he spoke – for only 45 minutes – one year at the closing ceremony of the Havana Film Festival, when Holly Aylett and myself were making a film about the festival, ‘Havana Report’, for Channel Four.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/193147973[/vimeo]

At the end of the festival, when we were getting clips from a number of films to include in ours, we had to grab what we wanted from the prize winners double quick, because he had asked to see them. He was also accused by his enemies of being a cultural tyrant, but when I was researching at the ICAIC for my book on Cuban cinema, I found no evidence of it. Has history absolved him? It already has, of course. But it isn’t over.

Julio García Espinosa 1926-2016

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JGE

Very sad to hear of the death in Havana of the pioneer of Cuban cinema, Julio García Espinosa, at the age of 89. One of the founding members of Cuba’s film institute, the ICAIC, of which he was President from 1983-91, he was the author of a key manifesto, ‘For an imperfect cinema’ (1969), where he argued that the imperfections of a low budget cinema of urgency, which  sought to create a dialogue with its audience, were preferable to the sheen of high production values which merely reflected the audience back to itself.

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Cuba in Nottingham

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A short note on the Cuba Research Forum conference which has just taken place at Nottingham, which suggests that international research on Cuba is in good health. Under the as-ever cheerful helm of Tony Kapcia, we heard from speakers of various nationalities, either based in the UK or abroad, and several Cubans, ditto, including, from Havana, the redoubtable Fernando Martínez Heredia, who spoke about the diverse origins of Cuban socialism. We also enjoyed a special lecture delivered with great verve by the distinguished Cuban-American historian, Louis Pérez, outlining his current work on the nineteenth century Cuban middle class and the figure of the coquette, a suggestive rethinking of cultural history. As always the forum was multidisciplinary and covered an impressively wide range of topics: Read more

New? Latin American? Cinema?

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The proper title of Havana’s annual film festival, founded in 1979, is the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema – Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano.  The words mark the Festival’s identification with a movement that was born in the 1960s, in the diverse endeavours of a new generation of filmmakers across the continent. The Festival remains a model of its kind after thirty-five years, the programme not only full of films in cinemas across town but also workshops and masterclasses of all sorts. This year’s centre-piece seminar (in which I was privileged to be one of the panelists) boldly addressed the Festival’s very raison d’être, under the title ¿Nuevo? ¿Cine? ¿Latinoamericano? – ‘New? Latin American? Cinema?’ It went along with perhaps the strangest festival promo you’ve ever seen, beautifully made by Pavel Giroud, in which an old projectionist switches off his projector, takes the reel off and goes and buries it.

[youtube aJNg73RM-U4]

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