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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.

In a city once promised to become the hub of the Soviet nuclear project in the Caribbean, the scant remains of this world weigh down on these three solitary men, who, unlike their pet fish Benjamin, have yet to learn how to breathe under water. With starkly beautiful black-and-white compositions, a darkly comic family drama unfolds, intercut with archival TV footage celebrating the promise of the Communist era.

La.obra.del.siglo.2015.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.x264-KG.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 39 min
Size: 	1.89 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 444 kb/s
BPP: 	0.049
Audio
#1:  	Spanish 2.0ch AAC @ 256 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/AC97D518E017B67/La.obra.del.siglo.2015.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.x264-KG.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English – hc

The post Carlos Quintela – La obra del siglo AKA The Project of the Century (2015) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

	
Vampires in Havana (1985) Juan Padron.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 12 min
Size: 	1.01 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	684x456 ~> 684x513
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	1 800 kb/s
BPP: 	0.241
Audio
#1:  	Spanish 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/E7270BFC33AE1A4/Vampires_in_Havana_(1985)_Juan_Padron.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese

Many thanks to @Marcio for this copy.

The post Juan Padrón – ¡Vampiros en La Habana! AKA Vampires of Havana (1985) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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. Exploiting her position of power, Cecilia bows to Leonardo’s demands providing he agrees to shelter a wounded member of the resistance movement at his home. Leonardo’s wealthy father Cándido de Gamboa, a rich white Spanish slave-trader who is, unbeknown to Cecilia, her father has other plans for his son, namely marriage to a woman of equal social standing.And he arranges the boy’s engagement to a white girl of his own class. Cecilia persuades a friend to stop the wedding, with tragic results.

Cecilia.1982.DVDRip.x264-PTP.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 11 min
Size: 	2.34 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	698x428 ~> 743x428
Aspect ratio:  	1.738
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 349 kb/s
BPP: 	0.315
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#1:  	Spanish 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/DF9280BD6ED974F/Cecilia.1982.DVDRip.x264-PTP.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English

The post Humberto Solás – Cecilia (1982) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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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.

La.bella.del.Alhambra.1989.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 50 min
Size: 	1.90 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	682x460 ~> 736x460
Aspect ratio:  	16:10
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 266 kb/s
BPP: 	0.289
Audio
#1:  	Spanish 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/D4EA1370184E17C/La.bella.del.Alhambra.1989.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/99F49266561E2A3/La.bella.del.Alhambra.1989.srt

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English

The post Enrique Pineda Barnet – La bella del Alhambra AKA The Beauty of the Alhambra (1989) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

During the lavish meal itself the master shamelessly dishes out self-righteous rhetoric while his slaves throw themselves upon their food. Facing their intermittent recriminations, he resorts to nonsensical logic to explain the social structure of the plantation.

The majority of Alea’s picture takes place at the dinner table. As such, The Last Supper is predominantly a conversation piece. However, the impact of the meal reverberates on Good Friday when the slaves rebel, holding their demonic overseer hostage. The revolt incurs the wrath of their master, who unleashes the dogs and orders his ‘apostles’ beheaded. Alea’s hitherto measured pace here swiftly escalates towards a chilling, violent denouement played out to a cacophony of crazed drumbeats and impassioned chants.

The spirit of Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel hangs in the air throughout this multifaceted allegory, as Alea sets up and swiftly shoots down a number of targets. Boasting distinctive performances across the board, The Last Supper offers a thought-provoking meditation on masterhood and servitude, freedom and bondage.

The film’s title sequence, in which Alea picks out various details of an impressive canvas, pre-empts the director’s painterly framings and his palette of delicate colours.

La.ultima.cena.1976.Tomas.Gutierrez.Alea.576p.BluRay.DD2.0.x264.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 52mn
Size:	2.80 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	920x576
Aspect ratio:	16:10
Frame rate:	24.000 fps
Bit rate:	3 310 kb/s
Audio
Spanish 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/93F49C2F98DEE2D/La.ultima.cena.1976.Tomas.Gutierrez.Alea.576p.BluRay.DD2.0.x264.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English, French

The post Tomás Gutiérrez Alea – La última cena AKA The Last Supper (1976) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

From epicentregallery:
This film represents a great moment in Cuban cinema. My impression was of an Ealing Comedy directed by Ken Loach or even what ‘Dogma’ were trying to get back to. Las Doce Sillas is filmed ‘on the hoof’, on location in early ’60s Cuba. Like many films of this period from Cuba it gives an insight into the early days of the revolution. Real crowd scenes are utilized and everyday life and people form the backdrop.

The film is adapted from a Russian farce by Iliya Arnoldovich. The tale has been made into film many times. Firstly in Yugolavia (1927) and perhaps most famously a version was made by Mel Brooks in 1970 (his second stab at directing).

The.Twelve.Chairs.1962.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 33 min
Size: 	1.44 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	708x384 ~> 708x442
Aspect ratio:  	16:10
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 000 kb/s
BPP: 	0.294
Audio
#1:  	Spanish 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/848067907E6B4D5/The.Twelve.Chairs.1962.DVDRIP.x264.AC3.KJNU.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English

The post Tomás Gutiérrez Alea – Las doce sillas AKA The Twelve Chairs (1962) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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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.

When his wife and parents leave for the United States shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion, 38-year-old playboy Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) resigns himself to a ritual of neurotic self-analysis. From his apartment, he observes the threat of foreign invasion that haunts the hazy, not-so-distant horizon. Bored and unemployed (he owns the apartment building he lives in), he chases after women all over Havana before finally meeting and bedding 16-year-old Elena (Daisy Granados), who he seemingly attempts to mold after his ex-wife by giving the young girl the woman’s hand-me-downs. If Alea deliberately likens the virginal Elena to a country that welcomes its own defilement, Sergio’s acquittal by the courts (he’s accused to raping the girl by her parents) is no doubt indicative of the man’s obsession with Cuba’s own defilement of its Marxist loyalties.

Underdevelopment refers both to Cuba’s political stagnation and Sergio’s own sense of false enlightenment. The way Alea pieces together the film must count as its own act of political resistance: documentary footage calls attention to a complex individual-group dialectic tearing up the country from the inside while a series of self-referential, surrealist interruptions are alive with better-than-here hopefulness. “She makes me feel underdevelopment everywhere,” says Sergio of Elena before visiting the home of Ernest Hemingway, who according to Sergio killed animals and mounted them on his walls so he wouldn’t have to kill himself. One of Alea’s most jarring framing devices situates Elena as an exotic specimen (“a beautiful Cuban señorita”) trapped beneath the lens of American imperialism. Like Hemingway and Elena herself, it’s only a matter of time before Cuba itself would self-destruct.

The film is haunted by one particular image that appears early on: poet and revolutionary José Martí’s face withering to near obscurity on the wall of a building. Hiroshima Mon Amour is a major point of reference for Alea. In both Resnais’ Hiroshima and Alea’s Havana, human ghosts come to grips with the implications of their past and grapple with the weight of building a new present for themselves. Like Elena, Cuba struggles to “establish links” between its war-torn past and disenchanted present. Memories of Underdevelopment remains a difficult and enigmatic work precisely because Cuba has yet to emerge from a kind of historical and cultural vacuum created by the vise of foreign threats, invasions and embargoes. And like Sergio, the country and its people can only wallow in the unfulfilled promise of its revolutionary consciousness.

Tomas Gutierrez Alea - (1968) Memories of Underdevelopment.mkv

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Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 38 min
Size: 	2.45 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	960x576 
Aspect ratio:  	5:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 339 kb/s
BPP: 	0.252
Audio
#1:  	Italian 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/E293ED9FE3A7E95/Tomas_Gutierrez_Alea_-_(1968)_Memories_of_Underdevelopment.mkv

Language(s):Spanish, English
Subtitles:English

The post Tomás Gutiérrez Alea – Memorias del subdesarrollo AKA Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) first appeared on Cinema of the World.