“We are a very resilient people”: In the face of Trump’s threats, Cuban cinema is out fighting | film

AAt a packed union meeting in Havana, a worker criticizes management’s delay in sending a technician to repair faulty machinery. It indicates that perhaps the desired specialist has not yet been born. Another worker named Lina – one of the few women working on the site – stands up to criticize the dilapidated state of the shipyard.

All the while, a bourgeois theater director named Oscar is searching for characters for his next creative project. This is Hasta Cierto Punto (“Until a Certain Point”), a 1983 film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea that interrogates the state of gender relations in post-revolutionary Cuba.

If the scale of sold-out screenings at the Screen Cuba Film Festival is anything to go by – and Hasta Certo Punto is one of them – then popular interest in the Caribbean nation shows little sign of abating, especially in the current context of aggressive US intervention here and elsewhere.

Of course, Washington’s anger toward its island neighbor is nothing new. Last October, for the thirty-third year in a row, the United Nations General Assembly once again adopted a resolution condemning the blockade imposed by the United States against Cuba. These sanctions have been in place since the early 1960s, making them some of the longest in modern history.

Under imperial domination and with severe restrictions on its ability to trade and access resources, Cuba may seem like an enigma to audiences curious about the kind of cinema that arose in such conditions.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 radically changed the development of cinema in the country. Filmmaking existed before “this moment of activism,” but it has historically been a tradition of Hollywood-style filmmaking, according to Jessica Gordon Burrows, a lecturer in Latin American studies at the University of Edinburgh. In contrast, the first decade after the revolution was a “very exciting and innovative period, both politically and aesthetically, in Cuba.”

Within a year of the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship, Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government established the Cuban Institute of Cinematic Arts and Industry (ICAIC) as an incubator for new cinematic practices that could play their part in the broader project of what Aimé Césaire later referred to as “tropical Marxism.”

Alea was one of the beneficiaries of the new cultural infrastructure, and his works reflect developments in Cuban cinema over the past decades, from the sharp satire of everyday life in Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), to the emergence of international co-productions such as Strawberries and Chocolate (1993), necessitated by a lack of funding at a time of severe economic crisis.

Now in its third year, Screen Cuba hopes to bring UK audiences to the attention of the cinema culture that has fueled works such as Humberto Solás’s 1968 trilogy epic, Lucia, in which three major historical events are played through the life of the protagonist in different forms, but with the same name.

Dodi Wepler, one of the organizers of Screen Cuba, admitted that “it is very rare for people to be able to watch films” and described the US blockade as a “disastrous blockade”.

It affected us [with] Submit films electronically. You have a power outage [so] You start by having a discussion on WhatsApp and then [the] “The electricity is cut off.”

Restoration and distribution are also at the forefront of the festival’s engagement with Cuban filmmakers, the latter a particular point of interest in cinema in general.

Trish Meehan, one of the festival’s organizers, said Screen Cuba made a modest contribution to help fund the restoration of some short films by the Cuban “godfather of animation,” Juan Padrón. She also noted that “it is very, very difficult to get any international distribution point [Cuban] Films” because of the need to pay application fees, and that this is “just a small part of the siege, but it is endless.”

One alternative to the established festival circuits, whose main centerpiece – the Oscars – took place on the same day as Screen Cuba’s launch, is the Havana Film Festival. Launched as the International Film Festival of New Latin American Cinema in 1979, the event built on the foundation of radical cinematic movements, such as “Third Cinema” and “Incomplete Cinema,” which emerged from the continent but were by no means limited to it.

Gordon Burroughs said: “I think Imperfect Cinema in particular has been an inspiration for a lot of filmmakers around the world… You see African filmmakers citing it, Indian filmmakers citing it. [It’s] A powerful oppositional concept in terms of thinking about alternative ways of producing cinema outside of Hollywood, mass production and standard capitalist value systems.

Films like Hasta Cierto Punto, which won the Grand Coral for best film at the festival in 1983, signaled “a new openness, perhaps” in discussions of topics like gender while bumping up against continuing restrictions.

At one point in the film, Lena challenges Oscar about the lack of female participation in his line of work. It’s a criticism that Sara Gomez, Cuba’s first female director, is familiar with.

Described by Gordon Burroughs as “this amazing early filmmaker” who has “certainly been overlooked” in narratives of the country’s cinema history, Gómez was a pioneering Cuban filmmaker, whose first film, Da Serta Manera, was not released until after her death – yet her working-class feminist approach to tackling sexism actually predated Hasta Certo Punto’s exploration of the subject. Screen Cuba has also included a number of its short documentaries in its programme.

“I like to think that Cuban cinema is very honest, but at the same time, it is very poetic,” said Tania Delgado, director of the Havana Film Festival and former vice president of ICAIC. “When you see Cuban cinema, it is very strong in terms of images, in terms of themes.”

To the outside world, Cuba remains a country often viewed through ideologically colored lenses. On the one hand, it is the home of the 1966 Tricontinental Conference, and has a great reputation in parts of the world as depicted by Jehane Tahiri in Cuba, an African epic that reflected on the country’s role in post-colonial conflicts in Africa. On the other hand, it is a one-party state in which a large number of people voted with their feet, thus contributing to a diaspora cinema filled with shades of frustration and loss.

Gordon Burroughs points out that Cuban films “have become less political in recent years,” while Delgado points to contemporary themes raised by creators that address “the reality we live in.” [on a] Daily… Domestic Relationships, Violence… LGBTQ+ Topics Plus [also] Very frequent in our cinema.”

However, the growing risk that another US president will seek regime change in Havana remains as topical as ever. As President Trump threatens a “friendly takeover” that would be far from friendly, the island has been hit by its third nationwide power outage this month. At the weekend, an international aid convoy, accompanied by figures such as Jeremy Corbyn and the Irish rap group Nycap, arrived in Cuba in a symbolic act of solidarity.

As Delgado says: “We have a very difficult siege – a siege – and it affects everything, and cinema is no exception. We are a very resilient people, and if anything, we are looking for solutions, we are looking for maintaining creativity… [of] Cultural life in Cuba… What we cannot lose now is hope.

“The world is in a very complicated situation and Cuba is no exception. I like to think of all the solidarity we offer to everyone who needs us, to be there to do something, and art and culture is no exception to that.”