Si! Cuba! is a season of ten films celebrating forty years of film production in Cuba. The films have been selected by the organisers of the New Zealand Film Festival and will be presented in Auckland and Wellington commencing late next month. The season is the second event in the inaugural New Zealand-Cuba Film Exchange that began in February this year with extensive New Zealand film programmes in Havana and Matanzas.Si! Cuba! is a season of ten films celebrating forty years of film production in Cuba. The films have been selected by the organisers of the New Zealand Film Festival and will be presented in Auckland and Wellington commencing late next month. The season is the second event in the inaugural New Zealand-Cuba Film Exchange that began in February this year with extensive New Zealand film programmes in Havana and Matanzas."ICAIC, Cuba's film institute, opened their vaults to us and we have selected ten films to illustrate the strength, diversity and changes that have taken place in filmmaking during the Castro era. We'll be showing such classics as the historical epic Lucia to the recent hit Life is to Whistle, a lyrical drama of life in contemporary Havana." says Film Festival director, Bill Gosden.

AUCKLAND: The Academy, September 30 - October 13

WELLINGTON: The Paramount, October 7 - 20.

Programme details will be posted on the Film Festival website www.nzff.co.nz Printed programmes available from September 9.

Life is to Whistle

La vida es silbar
Director: Fernando Perze (1999)

Combining surrealism, humour and insightful drama, Life Is To Whistle alternates between the romantic mishaps of three troubled people living in Havana: Mariana, a lusty young ballerina who takes a soon-to-be regrettable vow of chastity to land a coveted role: Hunky musician Elpidio, a modern-day buccaneer who steals the wallets and the hearts of visiting tourists; and Julia, a sensitive social worker who literally faints at the very mention of the word sex. Perez orchestrates their separate searches for personal fulfilment with narrative agility, a sense of the fantastic - he cites the painter Magritte as the presiding spirit of his film - and a surprisingly gritty view of Havana on the cusp of the new century. "The mix of fantasy and street realism is earthy and erotic; sex and music underscore the entire film. It's a loving and gorgeous portrait but the pieces of the puzzle don't always fit together. But maybe that's as it should be. You won't find propaganda in Life Is to Whistle, only one man's ambivalent feelings toward a mother country in an identity crisis." - Sean Axmaker, Seattle Post

Lucía

Director: Humberto Sólas (1968)

One of the great films of the 60s from anywhere, Lucia was acclaimed worldwide as the "Gone With The Wind of the Cuban film industry," and has never really disappeared from the repertory of potent political drama. Cuba's first film spectacular, it's an epic, three-part feature dramatizing three separate periods in the Cuban struggle for liberation in order to show the participation of Cuban women in that fight. In 1895, Lucia (Raquel Revuelta) is embroiled in a tale of love and betrayal during Cuba's war for independence from Spain; in 1933, Lucia (Eslinda Nunez) leaves her middle-class family and becomes involved in the overthrow of the Cuban dictator Machado; and in the 1960s, Lucia (Adela Legra) is taught how to read and write during Cuba's literacy campaign and, as a newlywed, confronts her husband's macho attitudes. Each episode is filmed in a distinctive visual style which translates the spirit of each historical era, with the themes of love, death and war achieving epic proportions. "To describe Lucia as a masterpiece seems almost to belittle it - a monument of virtuoso filmmaking and a model of how to tell a collective story in recognisably human terms" - Jan Dawson, Monthly Film Bulletin

Plaff!

Demasiado miedo a la vida o Plaff
Director: Juan Carlos Tabío (1988)

"For Concha, the middle-aged protagonist of this lively if sardonic comedy, life is a battle. Her baseball hero son has married the gorgeous Clarita, a modern woman who seems more interested in scientific research than in housekeeping or motherhood, and they're living in Concha's house. What's more, Concha is constantly pestered by the ardent, taxi-driving Jose Ramón, always turning up with a bottle of wine and a hopeful gleam in his eye. The very sight of her next door neighbour is a constant, taunting reminder of her late husband's infidelities - and somebody keeps throwing eggs at her. Whenever Concha thinks she's buttonholed the assailant - and she suspects almost everybody - her accusation is interrupted by the arrival of extenuating evidence: the next egg hits the wall. God himself is against her. Plaff! - the title is the sound of a breaking egg - comically undermines her direly negative attitude and it's surprising just how provocative the subversion of misery can seem - Robust, good-humoured and quite astonishingly outspoken about the state of things in Cuba, Plaff! is as informative as it is funny. €” Bill Gosden, Wellington Film Festival 1989

Memories of Underdevelopment

Memorias del Subdesarrollo
Director: Tomás Gutierrez Alea (1968)

"The Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) was founded in 1959, only months after Castro came to power. It was some years, however, before its fruits were exposed to European and US audiences; Alea's film, his fifth feature, was the breakthrough. The story is related in the form of a diary by a prosperous bourgeois who chooses to stay in Havana when his family leaves for the states in 1961. While he rejects many of the bourgeois ideals of his upbringing, he is unable to shake off either sexual neurosis or his European-based intellectual paralysis, continuing to live uncertainly as a rent-drawing property-owner. The 'underdevelopment' of the title is a complex pun describing both individual and national problems of the revolution in its infancy, though the film is anything but literary in its attack: Alea proceeds with dazzling and highly accomplished technique towards a perceptive and witty analysis." €” Rod McShane, Time Out Film Guide. "Sophisticated and cosmopolitan in style, fascinating in its subtlety and complexity... a profound, noble film" --Peter Schjeldahl, New York Times

The Last Supper

La ultima cena (1976)
Director: Tomás Gutierrez Alea (1968)

Eight years after Memories - Alea once again found an international audience with this startlingly black comedy, based on an actual incident from 18th-century Cuban history. "Set in the last years of the 18th century, it tells of an inevitably abortive attempt at paternalism by the religious owner of a sugar plantation who, during Holy Week, attempts to convince himself of his spiritual purity by performing acts of munificence towards his slaves. He gathers together twelve of them, one of whom has just had his ear cut off after an escape bid, for his own version of the Last Supper, casting himself in the role of Christ-like benefactor. This long sequence alone, during which he and the slaves talk and drink themselves into stupor, is worthy of Bunuel himself not only in force of argument but in its irony and humour. Good Friday, he proclaims, will be a day of rest. But he has not informed his brutal overseer, who is then held captive by the slaves to await confirmation of their master's instructions. It is then that the system betrays its true colors - The film is, quite simply, a masterwork of Latin-American cinema." - Derek Malcolm, The Guardian

Maluala

Director: Sergio Giral (1979)

"Sergio Giral is the best known of the Black Cuban directors and his previous films were historical observations of the period of slavery in Cuba, the gradual rise of rebellion against colonial traditions, and the ultimate freedom that resulted. Maluala is the most striking addition to this genre. The action takes place during the last century in the region of Maluala. Gallo, the black chieftain, together with his cohort, Coba, present a petition for land and liberty to the colonial government. Governor Escudero offers liberty if the rebellious villages will be dismantled and their men offer themselves in surrender. He promises that they will be freed shortly thereafter. Three chieftains agree, but Gallo and Coba refuse - . Giral has mounted Maluala with colorful ritual and the acting. Samuel Claxton, as Gallo, is highly stylized in the heroic tradition. It is an absorbing adventure film wrought from historical events which appear exotic and violent, but Giral constantly implants into every image the necessity for unity among people in order to combat man's seemingly casual desire to subjugate mankind, in the struggle for power and undefined ambition." - San Francisco Film Festival, 1980

Portrait of Teresa

Retrato de Teresa
Director: Pastor Vega (1979)

That the Cuban woman is still struggling becomes abundantly clear in Pastor Vega's wry engaging Portrait of Teresa. Teresa is a pretty, capable young Havana wife and mother who has been happily married for 11 years and has three sons. Her husband Ramon is a TV repairman who is trying to study to qualify for a promotion. Like couples in capitalist countries Teresa and Ramon are struggling to make ends meet, so she works in a textile factory. However, Teresa, who is bright and vivacious, clearly has leadership abilities that emerge when she becomes an assistant director in her union's dance troupe - Ramon hits the ceiling, but Teresa has in fact just gotten her first intoxicating whiff of freedom from domesticity. The humour with which Vega tells of Teresa and Ramon's clashes proves deceptive as the picture gradually darkens. Yet this film is fair-minded, capable of extending compassion to Ramon and rightly concerned with the quality of family life but smart enough to realise that eventually nothing is going to be the same for men - even machismo-obsessed Latin men. Portrait is a film of much sunshine, quaint pastel cottages and driving Latin rhythms, aspects which serve only to set up its culminating serious impact. €” Kevin Thomas, LA Times, 9/3/80

Vampires in Havana

Vampiros en La Habana
Director: Juan Padrón(1985)

"In a blatant bid for a piece of the international entertainment action, Cuba unleashes a bawdy feature-length animation on the adventures of the dead - Fast, brash and racy, Juan Padron's opus is set in the politically incorrect Cuba of 1933 and features a war between a consortium of European vampires and their Chicago-based rivals. The two gangs converge on Havana, where an expatriate vampire scientist has developed a wonder drug (something like an eye-of-newt pina colada) allowing bloodsuckers immunity from the sun - The tone is blithely grotesque - . Vampires is inhabited by free-form potato-heads with big snouts, lolling tongues, snaggle-toothed maws and insouciantly exaggerated racial or sexual characteristics - There's explicit (if stylised) sex, as well as an abundance of colourful antisocial elements. Havana is a city of pisoirs, posadas, and pastel-coloured nightlife - ot's positivelt wholesome compated to the blood-serving speakeasies of Chicago, but the Euro vamps have a hard time finding a satisfactory meal. "No Cubans, please, they taste of sugar," one protests. Ultimately they attack a gang of drunken tourists with broad American accents." - J Hoberman, Village Voice.