International Havana Film FestivalStanding before a capacity crowd in Havana's cavernous Karl Marx Theater, festival Director Alfredo Guevara officially kicked off the opening ceremony for the 19th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema with a long, lyrical welcoming speech laced with references to history, ideology, politics, religion, the arts and, of course, film. The breadth of Guevara's speech set the tone for a festival that would not only provide a showcase for Latin American film and related initiatives, but would also prove itself to be a journey through Cuba.
Just moments before the ceremony I had been transfixed by the vintage American cars, specimens of a bygone era, that were negotiating their way through the great crowd of waiting people who had amassed in front of the theater and spilled out from the sidewalk and into the street. A screenwriter might have conceived this scene as: "Ext. 1950s Hollywood Movie Set -- Evening." But the '55 Buicks and Hudson Hornets were mostly beat-up relics and they were interspersed with clunky Soviet-made Ladas; the anxious onlookers wore modest clothes, nothing that resembled period costumes; and with a theater named after Karl Marx... this was at least one economic system removed from the orbit of Hollywood.
And yet there was this feeling of being on a movie set, like an extra in one of the world's longer works-in-progress, the thirty-nine year old brainchild of that renowned first-time director, Fidel Castro. This was, after all, Castro's revolutionary Cuba, an experiment in socialism that desperately needed finishing funds to surmount a growing economic crisis -- a crisis brought on by the combined effects of the loss of East Bloc patronage, a long-standing U.S. embargo, and the inability of Cuba's creaky economic system to adapt and prosper.
I couldn't help but wonder why, during these worst of times, Cuba had decided to go to the trouble and expense of rolling out the red carpet for ten days (December 2-12) as host of a cultural event that not only featured film, but also showcased concerts, plays, exhibits and book readings. Were there not more pressing issues to tackle? As the festival unfolded, I began to understand that hosting this event was more than mere indulgence.
Cuba had founded the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in 1979, when its film industry was prospering, and in so doing it had established itself as a beacon for Latin American film; now, faced with an economic crisis, Cuba felt that it was important to show its resilience by continuing to host the event. Besides, what better way to get positive publicity than to hold a film festival? Since everything in Cuba is government-run (at least officially), good publicity for the festival would amount to good publicity for Cuba. And now, more than ever, Cuba was relying on its image as a fun-loving, balmy, beautiful (though run down) and foreigner-friendly country to attract tourists, who would provide Cuban coffers with valuable hard currency.
And there were other reasons for Cuba to hold the festival. In addition to drawing the media and tourists, the aim was to lure potential outside investors who might give a shot in the arm to the cash-starved Cuban film industry. Nor was the festival audience limited to foreign tourists or film industry types, as attested by the thousands of Cubans who attended the opening ceremony. Cuban people have a genuine knowledge and love of film and there would have been much grumbling if the government had nixed the show.
When Fidel came to power in 1959 he declared that cinema was the most important form of artistic expression, followed by television. Prior to 1959 Cuba was an important market for foreign films (seven million Cubans produced a weekly average of one and a half million moviegoers), but it lacked a homegrown film industry. This changed on March 24, 1959, with the first cultural decree of the revolutionary government which created the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) under the leadership of none other than Alfredo Guevara, a former classmate of Castro in his student days. Guevara stated that his mission was to use ICAIC "to demystify cinema for the entire population; to work, in a way, against our own power; to reveal all the tricks, all the recourses of language; to dismantle all the mechanisms of cinematic hypnosis." This mission has been facilitated by the virtual monopoly ICAIC has had on Cuban filmmaking since its inception, allowing it to manage the country's production of animated cartoons, features, documentaries and newsreels, as well as run the Festival of Latin American Cinema.
Domestic Cuban film production, even at its height in the 1980s, never kept up with the demand by Cuban audiences. To meet this demand the Cuban government and ICAIC devised various strategies. In rural areas where movie theaters were often unheard of, they created mobile cinemas consisting of trucks, mule teams and small boats equipped with projection equipment and stocked with a wide array of Cuban and non-Cuban film titles. They routinely pirated American movies and showed them on television, along with other foreign films, providing in-depth analyses of these films during weekly programs like "24 X SEG" (i.e., twenty-four frames per second) designed to educate audiences about film history, language and technique. And with the creation of the Festival of Latin American Cinema, ICAIC found a way to bring movies to the Cuban public without paying for distribution, especially important during the current period of belt-tightening.
Festival Vice-Director, Ivan Giroud, describes the Festival of Latin American Cinema as being "a festival for Cubans." "The Cuban public is film educated," he says, "so this is a festival which puts them in the center." He adds that it's the only festival in the world that has half a million viewers in 10 days, the average capacity of each theater being 700-1500 seats.
It's not hard to believe the numbers Giroud is throwing around. Films are screened all over Havana during the festival, starting with the theaters near the stately Hotel Nacional, the film festival headquarters, and going further afield to some of the more remote areas of the city. Nor do the screenings stop there, as many of the films shown during the festival also make it to venues located in other parts of the country like Santiago de Cuba, the second largest city, situated opposite Havana on the other end of the island.
Cuban moviegoers have also come to expect to see films from all over the world during the festival. The theaters were filled to capacity during screenings of Hurricane Streets, The Full Monty, Almovodar's latest film, Live Flesh, and Zhang Yimou's Keep Cool. A number of directors, both Cuban and foreign, had their works featured as part of retrospectives. Among these were Robert Altman, the Kaurismaki brothers, German filmmaker Volker Schlondorff (The Tin Drum), and Cuba's own preeminent documentarian, Santiago Alvarez, who for many years directed the production of the weekly newsreels shown in theaters as previews to feature films and used by the Cuban government to inform the Cuban public and their world views. Still other directors had their works included in sections of the festival aimed at providing audiences with a taste for productions coming out of particular countries like France, Spain, Japan, Norway, the United States (focusing on independent film) and Italy (focusing on Neapolitan filmmakers).
Demonstrating their flexibility as to what constitutes Latin American cinema, the festival programmers selected three films from the United States to be included among the one-hundred films in competition. These three films qualified as being "Latin American" based on their crew and subject matter, rather than their strict origin. Men With Guns, the latest effort by John Sayles, for instance, qualified because it was shot entirely in Mexico with mostly Spanish dialogue and was based on a novel by Francisco Goldman.
The screening for Men With Guns was my first in the festival and I was surprised when two commercials were shown before the film began -- evidently, some lessons of capitalism were not lost on the Cubans. But it was capitalism with a twist, since the advertised products, "Close Up" toothpaste and "Rexona" deodorant, can only be bought with U.S. dollars and their prices are the equivalent of about one-fourth the average Cuban monthly salary. The only way for Cubans to afford consumption of those products would be by working to earn U.S. dollars illegally, outside of official government channels, or by receiving money from relatives living in the United States (or elsewhere). Otherwise, Cubans are forced to use the products rationed by their government, increasingly unavailable or sub-par in quality.
Men With Guns was concerned with another sort of hardship, the kind that led to the resurgence of the Zapatista rebel movement in Mexico. Sayles' film is about a sheltered Mexican doctor who goes searching for the idealistic former students he sent out to work as medics in remote areas inhabited by destitute and oppressed indigenous tribes. What the doctor finds is a hard dose of Mexican social reality: military brutality and co-option, civilian apathy and ineffectual priests. While the film set out to be a kind of thriller with a social conscience, it came across as being overly pedantic and consequently drew a number of laughs in the wrong places by the Cuban audience. It certainly came nowhere close to equaling the craftsmanship of Lone Star.
After the screening of Men With Guns I experienced what would prove to be a recurring incident-- closed doors. For ten minutes after the credits had finished rolling by the doors to the theater were kept closed and people were forced to wait inside. I was told that this was a manifestation of the extra security measures taken after the bombings that had occurred in public places earlier in the year. If a bomber knows that the theater will be locked once the screening begins, then he or she may be less likely to set the bomb off. So the logic goes, never mind fire hazards and suicide bombers.
Festival logistics are often a target of criticism, and Cuba was no exception. I might as well have been asking dinosaurs what they thought about the comet situation when I approached the information desk at the press center with a question concerning the availability of e-mail. While a festival program was published daily indicating what films were showing where, the unpredictability of mail delivery meant that prints didn't always arrive in time to be screened. Twice I sat down expecting to see the film listed in the program, but found myself watching something totally unexpected instead. Also, seeing more than two feature-length movies which have been getting good word-of-mouth reviews in one day is a Herculean task, given that there are hardly any buses available for transportation from one theater to the other. And if the movie is particularly popular, a festival press pass does not always guarantee a seat, since forging passes has become a lucrative cottage industry. Having said all that, the festival staff was uniformly terrific, and always ready with advice on how to most effectively navigate through the festival and take advantage of its many offerings.
Relying upon the recommendations of festival staffers, I went to see the film Martin (Hache) by the Argentinian director Adolfo Aristarain. Touted as the best Argentinian film produced in the last ten years, Martin (Hache) is about a solipsistic director who refuses to take responsibility for his estranged teenage son (Hache stands for junior) or for the commitment-seeking, substance-abusing girlfriend who is some twenty years younger than he is. Although the cast was solid, the characters generally came across as static and self-absorbed and did not elicit empathy. Still, the film took first prize in the festival, it won the third most votes from the audience (surveys were passed out at each screening), and it was picked up by Geoffrey Gilmore to be shown in the World Cinema program of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival.
Another audience favorite and winner of the prize for best screenplay, was the thriller Ceneizas del Paraiso (The Ashes of Paradise). Also from Argentina, this thriller by Marcel Pinero revolves around the investigation of the mysterious assassination of a beautiful woman which implicates three brothers, each of whom confesses to the crime and claims sole responsibility. The investigation ultimately unravels political corruption at the highest levels of government and business, while stopping short of offering any facile conclusions, preferring to leave the spectator with the grim realization that corruption will remain unexposed and the truly guilty will go unpunished. While Ceneizas del Paraiso was reminiscent of The Usual Suspects and L.A. Confidential in its effective use of suspense and mystery, the essence of the film was firmly rooted in Argentina and its characters, places and themes.
A second film picked up by Geoffrey Gilmore for the World Cinema Program at Sundance was the Mexican film Quien Diablos Es Juliette (Who the Hell Is Juliette), by Carlos Marcovich. Crossing the line between fiction and documentary, Quien Diablos Es Juliette tells the story of how a Cuban prostitute, a Mexican model and a director came to meet during the shooting of a music video in Cuba, and the profound influence this meeting had on all their lives. After the screening of the film, I caught a ride with some Cuban actors to the posh Melia Cohiba hotel, where one of the many late-night concerts held in conjunction with the festival was about to begin. The drive toward the hotel along the Malecon, the coastal road on Havana's north side, featured prostitutes in their teens and twenties standing like cones at ten-yard intervals along a five-mile stretch, struggling to earn U.S. dollars by selling themselves to eager tourists, while their boyfriends stood in the background, freelancing as pimps. It became apparent to me why Marcovich had chosen to blur the line between fiction and documentary in his film.
From Brazil there came a compelling low-budget film entitled Un Ceu De Estrelas (A Starry Sky), which garnered four awards, including the prize for best first film, vindicating the persistence of Tata Amaral, its director, who was forced to resend her print this year after it had gotten lost in the mail on its way to last year's edition of the festival. Un Ceu De Estrelas is about a woman whose ex-fiancee refuses to let her go and traps her in a physical and emotional cage, a kind of "No Exit" situation. Notwithstanding her background as a music video director and her genuine appreciation of Hollywood film, Amaral said that she made the movie trying to avoid the classic, Syd Field, screenplay structure, where the protagonist must have an arc, because that does not reflect the way Brazilians are. In her view, Brazilian protagonists are not so much agents of change, as characters who react to circumstances, inescapable situations. "I wanted an alternative dramatic structure that would provoke people... to create another relationship with my audience, one that was interactive, sparking discussion and participaton. That's why the camera always follows one of the characters. It makes the audience feel as the characters do, living the way they do." Indeed, the film grips you from the first frame and takes you on its fatalistic downward spiral and does not let you go until the very last shot of the woman, finally forced to kill her ex-fiancee, who looks straight into the camera of a news crew which has followed the police onto the scene -- her look is piercing, the kind that won't let you look away. This was reality playing as fiction, but attempting to fool no one.
The economic crisis has hampered ICAIC's efforts to boost domestic film production, and consequently only three features films were produced by Cuban directors in the last year. Among these was Amor Vertical by Arturo Soto, a pleasing and uncomplicated story about a young couple looking for a place to make love, finding all kinds of obstacles along the way, and finally resorting to building a little house atop a bridge. The film had a universal quality about it, reflecting the need for youths to find their own space, but some of the funniest moments in the movie related directly to the hardships Cubans face in obtaining the simplest of goods, like butter or soap, through official channels, where everything is rationed, or through the black market, where everything sells at high prices in U.S. dollars.
The universality of Amor Vertical was an effect which Soto had expressely set out to achieve. "In making Cuban films," reasons Soto, "one must create something with universal appeal and look at international markets because there is no option, there is no market here." To his credit, Soto is one of the few Cuban directors who have succeeded in attracting foreign capital, and it was after he obtained financing from French and Brazilian companies that ICAIC agreed to provide the balance of his budget.
ICAIC's shortage of funds to make movies has forced both novice and veteran Cuban directors to learn how to pitch their projects. This has also caused some rivalry between the older and younger Cuban directors. Soto explained the situation: "Old directors are used to working on state subsidized films, through ICAIC. There was a certainty of getting a film made if you wrote the script. There was no need to look for money. Now, with the crisis, the rules have changed. Directors have to knock on doors. Young directors were not accustomed to doing this either , but they adapted more easily. And we feel less humiliated asking for money." Pastor Vega, one of those older Cuban directors whose first feature, Portrait of Teresa, is regarded as a seminal Cuban film, echoes Soto's words, saying, "To make a film now you have to find a foreign investment. We have no money to make film. So you have to find a producer from outside to shoot here... I am trying to make a film in the last two years, looking for money in Europe, here and there. Maybe I will do it at the beginning of the year, I am not sure, because the money is not in my pocket already." Vega has been forced to adapt, making a feature film on video, to be shown on Venezuelan television. He has relished the experience, but clearly wants to return to working with film.
For Cuban documentarians the situation is at once more promising and more desperate. Melchior Casals, an experienced documentary filmmaker who has worked with ICAIC for many years, described the contradiction: "...young people, because they work freelance, they do their documentaries without state controls, they have more freedom of expression. They shoot mostly on hi-8, not broadcast quality, working on weekends, nights, when they have time off their jobs. And I think these filmmakers have done some great work, full of passion, full of creative enthusiasm, searching for their own means of expression. I think it's one of the most important things going on in Cuba today. It is our underground cinema. It is of capital importance, as it is giving rise to the new values, future values, of film arts in this country." Casals then went on to explain the downside: "The ICAIC, the state film industry in Cuba offered something unique in Latin America, with perhaps the exception of Brazil and Argentina. It offered the possibility of working all year round. I used to make four documentaries a year, some very critical of Cuba, dealing with the problems of socialism. They have been shown in all of Cuba, were approved by the government and had no censorship problems. Since 1992, the beginning of the crisis, I haven't made any documentaries. With the embargo it is impossible to do this kind of documentary. It's not possible to get the financing. To get financing now, one has to do a film with guaranteed distribution, or a documentary that has a guaranteed sale."
ICAIC is trying to address the hardships confronting the Cuban film industry by making do with less resources and taking advantage of new technology. During the festival Guevara announced the creation of a video department at ICAIC, where documentary film can be made. ICAIC is also trying to extend its international reach, perhaps in the hope of drawing more foreign investment. Ivan Giroud explained that ICAIC was studying how to re-introduce MECLA (the market component of the festival, which was not held this year). "We want to redesign the market. We want to convert it into a market for projects, works-in-progress, scripts. The festival is for finished pictures. Also, usually the most important films have already been sold in other markets, other festivals. We want to work all year to find projects in Latin America. It's a model that's based on the Rotterdam film festival, but geared toward Latin American film festivals. It would take place concurrently with the Festival of Latin American Cinema."
There were a number of non-ICAIC initiatives at the festival. News of the creation of a $15 million dollar fund for Latin American film was received enthusiastically. A newly formed Association of Latin American Documentarians (ADAL), based in Venezuela, distributed its founding charter and held a meeting to discuss ways for the organization to link Latin American documentary filmmakers, and to help them produce and distribute their works. Sundance Programming Director Geoffrey Gilmore attended the festival, and brought along a number of directors and producers to participate in panels that discussed ways to promote cultural exchanges between film communities and to support independent filmmaking around the world. And there were dozens of producers and directors scouting Cuba for their next project, inquiring into the cast, crew and facilities available for production and post-production. How many of these projects will materialize into co-productions with Cuba is anybody's guess, but it may be Cuba's only hope for keeping its film industry afloat, at least in the near future.
There is always a degree of wariness on the part of potential co-producers, as it is hard to keep politics from intruding on the arts. While ICAIC may get away with screening Zhang Yimou's Keep Cool, which was banned in China, one of the few countries which, at least nominally, has some affinities with Cuba's economic system, censorship rears its head in both subtle and obvious ways when the subject matter is closer to home. Los Zaferos (The Sapphires), which won the top audience award, was produced out of Miami, but filmed in Cuba, a first in feature films. It is the true story of a quartet of singers who rose to become the Beatles of Cuba in the 1960s, only to fall as a result of their internal dissent. The story is original, cleverly blending actual footage into the film, and the Cuban cast is excellent, but the film is poor in context, probably a conscious attempt to avoid controversy that might arise from presenting politically sensitive details. There is a telling scene at the end of the movie when Benny More, the president of Motown records, goes up to the Zaferos after having just seen them perform in Paris. He offers them a record deal and invites them to come to the U.S. The answer, as we are subtly led to understand is "no," and it comes from the Cuban attache who watches over them hawkishly. After the break-up of the band, one of the original Zaferos chose to disregard that "no" and illegally emigrate to the United States; consequently, he was not allowed back in to Cuba to attend the premiere of the film at the festival.
Nowadays, the economic crisis has forced the Cuban government to let its artists take jobs abroad when they can (lest they all flee) and it is much more common for actors to work in Mexico, Venezuela, Spain and other Latin countries, while retaining their Cuban citizenship. The U.S. is still off-limits. Casals commented on this situation: "I haven't questioned those who go to the United States, establishing their residence there and working, because for me to stay in a country is an invention of the Cuban government. This doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. People go to other countries, work, then return to their countries without any problem. But if we go to the United States, this causes serious problems, political problems."
These political problems motivated the decision to disallow a trailer from a new film, tentatively entitled Dance With Me, by Randal Haines (Wrestling Hemingway), to be shown at a press conference during the festival. The trailer featured a singer who had defected to Cuba some years ago and become popular in Miami's Cuban community. To get around the censorship the publicists had to resort to the use of a series of clips from the film which left out the blacklisted singer.
This balancing act between artistic expression and exposure to censorship is familiar to Carlos Varela, Cuba's rock poet of dissent. Varela played before a full theatre in a concert that was organized by the festival programmers, an impressive display of artistic depth on their part. Varela opened the show with a tribute to the late Tomas Gutierrez Alea, who directed Strawberry and Chocolate, the only Cuban film to obtain commercial release (with the support of Sundance's Robert Redford) in the United States since the U.S. embargo. Like Alea, Varela's work is full of irony and relies heavily on imagery for its social critique. One of Varela's songs, "William Tell," has become the anthem for a generation. It is about the young in Cuba not getting the chance to do what their father, William Tell (i.e., Fidel Castro), did when he demonstrated his prowess by shooting the apple with his bow and arrow.
The festival offered up its own bit of irony unintentionally when it screened It's All True, a documentary recounting how Orson Welles fell from grace when he was sent down to Brazil to film a travel documentary that showed off "exotic" Brazil and instead took it upon himself to capture Brazil as it really was, warts and all. Welles never obtained the funds to finish this film and his attempt to complete it doomed his career, branding him an obsessive, irresponsible megalomaniac. While watching It's All True, it was hard not to see the parallels between Welles' project and Cuba, as a work-in-progress directed by Fidel Castro.
Although he was speaking in a slightly different context about the difficulty of putting together co-productions to finance Cuban filmmaking, Pastor Vega offered an apt comment regarding the Cuban work-in-progress: "This is a society trying to keep alive the most important values of the socialist system using the capitalist system. And that is very experimental. It is difficult to see what the result will be in the near future."
The International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, in the meantime, clings to its role as a beacon for the Latin American film industry, and offers to the public a rich film program, tremendous artistic depth and contact with a film community unlike any other. Whatever the near future holds, the festival certainly deserves its place in the sun.
Marco Masoni is the co-founder of Finishing Pictures, producer of CLIPS and SCRATCH, quarterly film and screenplay showcases, as well as ShortCase, the annual roundup of best American short films (premiering January 1999) . He works as an attorney and filmmaker/film consultant in New York City.
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