Michael Chanan

Cuba’s international film school, the EICTV, reminds me of Passport to Pimlico. Set up in 1986, it isn’t actually Cuban, but belongs to the Foundation for New Latin American Cinema (President: Gabriel García Marquez), whose friend Fidel declared it to be ‘not national territory’. If you arrive by the front gates, you have to pass a guard house, but they don’t seem very vigilant, and anyway there’s a back road which isn’t controlled. I’ve been going there every two years or so since the mid-90s to do workshops, much as other people from Britain and in fact all over (although I first went to Cuba in 1979 to write a book on Cuban cinema, and then filmed there on several occasions in the 80s for Channel Four). There’s a permanent staff, but also lots of visitors. On this visit there were workshops being given by film-makers from Chile, Peru, Argentina, Germany and Spain, and the foyer has graffiti scrawled on the walls by Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Costa Gavras, Ettore Scola and Stephen Friers among others. Distinguished company indeed!

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