Cuba

,

Quote:
Winner of the Tiger Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival, the second debut feature by Cuban director Carlos M. Quintela is set in the provincial Cuban town of Juragua, the planned home of a Soviet-backed nuclear plant that is now a ghost town with near-empty high-rise buildings.

Three generations of men struggle to co-exist under the same roof, in a city once destined for greatness. Amidst a mosquito plague, Leonardo, struggling with the breakdown of his relationship, moves back to live with a grandfather who fights with everyone and everything, and a father living with the melancholy of the unfinished.Read More »

A scientist invents a potion that allows vampires to be able to live under the rays of the sun. When the word gets out to the vampires of the world, they fly to Cuba to gain control of the potion. It becomes a battle between the American and the East European vampires. A trumpet player is the scientist’s nephew and holds the formula for the elixir.Read More »

Quote:
A story of the society that dominated 19th-century Cuba, a society divided between whites, blacks, and those who were mixed, the mulattos. (Since the Spanish conquistadors killed off the Indian population in Cuba not long after they took over the island, there are no mestizos, or those of mixed-Indian blood in Cuba as in other Caribbean nations.) At any rate, the drama about the life and loves of Cecilia, a Cuban girl of mixed race takes place against the backdrop of graphically violent mistreatment of slaves and the rumors of a slave rebellion after the Cubans hear of slaves turning against their captors in Haiti. Raised by her mother and grandmother as a courtesan within the ruling white establishment, pale-skinned Cecilia soon catches the eye of estate owner’s son Leonardo.Read More »

Quote:
Story shows the genesis of the career and the rise of Esther the most beloved actress of most popular theater in Havana at the turn of the 19th century.Read More »

This scathing black comedy from Cuban satirist Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is a dish that’s bitter to taste and hard to stomach. It’s an intricate and uncompromising fable that alarmingly boasts an authentic historical model.

In the 18th century, the wealthy owner of a sprawling Havana sugar plantation gives in to a misguided whim. As Holy Week approaches, he decides to host his own Last Supper, appointing himself as Christ and a dozen downtrodden slaves as the apostles. Held on Maundy Thursday, his re-enactment is a precarious proposition from the outset. At first, it offers Alea ample opportunity for comedy, as the pompous master cleans and flinchingly kisses the feet of the bemused slaves before taking to the table.Read More »

When her country is taken over by socialist revolutionaries, a wealthy woman can’t bear to give up all of her wealth and possessions to the new government, so she hides all of her treasures in the 12 chairs of a dining-room set. After her death her nephew finds out what she had done and, since the chairs had been “nationalized” and are now in the possession of a dozen different people, he sets out to track them down and get the treasures he believes rightfully belong to him.Read More »

Quote:
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s gutsy Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) is a difficult work of political activism. This stirring blend of narrative fiction, still photography and rare documentary footage catalogs the many intricacies and contradictions of a bourgeois Cuban intellectual’s loyalty to Castro’s revolution. Though Alea himself was devoted to the cause, his films forever scrutinized the self-devouring nature of Castro’s Cuba. (Alea died in 1996 shortly after the one-two success of the Oscar-nominated Strawberry and Chocolate and Guantanamera.) If Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba championed the need for revolution in the country, Memories contemplates the failure of the new government to recognize and negotiate the lingering bourgeois threat left in the wake of Fulgencio Batista’s fall.Read More »

The first years of the revolution, characterized by social transformations and class struggle, make man’s challenge to the animal fade into the background. A very skilled hunter, attached to his world and his myths, does not adapt easily to a changing context. A personal conflict will contribute to deepen his contradictions; his virtues as a hunter will be put to the test.Read More »

From wikipedia:
Julio García Espinosa (5 September 1926 – 13 April 2016) was a Cuban film director and screenwriter. He directed fourteen films between 1955 and 1998. His 1967 film The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin was entered into the 5th Moscow International Film Festival.Read More »