Mario Balmaseda

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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.Read More »

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Quasi documentary about the creation of the Miraflores housing development after the Cuban revolution. In this first Cuban feature film made by an Afro-Cuban and by a woman, Sara Gómez uses innovative documentary and fictional techniques to focus on the marginalised in the poorest, most underdeveloped areas of Cuba. Against a backdrop of dismantled slums and new housing construction, the relationship between a mulatta and a Black Cuban unfolds as a conflict between ingrown ideas of race, class and gender and a Revolution that is trying to dismantle the old, outmoded structures.Read More »

Here is a revolutionary film: dialectical in form and content, humble in the face of real human experience, proposing no final answers except the unending struggle of a people to make something out of what history has made of them. De cierta manera is that powerful hybrid—the fictional documentary set to a tropical beat—for which the cinema of revolutionary Cuba is justifiably famous. In this instance, the documentary deals with the destruction of slum housing and the struggle against the culture of marginality generated in such slums through the creation of a new housing project (Miraflores) and an accompanying educational program. The fictional embodiment of this historical process is seen in the clash of attitudes between Mario (a product of the slums), his lover Yolanda (a teacher who has come to Miraflores to help integrate such marginal elements into the revolution), and his friend Humberto (a fun-loving slacker). In the course of telling these stories, and others, De cierta manera demolishes the categories of fiction and documentary, insisting that both forms are equally mediated by the intention of the filmmaker, and that both thus require a critical stance.Read More »