Cuban film exchange sure to enlighten

By PETER CALDER


It is stretching a point, as organiser Julie Webb-Pullman does in introducing the programme of the Cuban Film Season beginning today, to say that Cuba and New Zealand have much in common.

Yes, we are "both island nations with histories of colonisation" but to suggest that we both have "bigger neighbours against whom [we] frequently struggle to assert and maintain [our] independent identities" offends by trivialising: there is a world of difference between transtasman rivalry and the United States' brutal economic repression of its neighbour.

That said, the season of films playing at the Academy Cinema in Auckland is the second instalment of an exchange which seems certain to improve our cultural links with the communist island republic.

A season of New Zealand films played in the cities of Havana and Matanzas in February (the opening night, in true Cuban style, was derailed by a blackout and the screening of Harry Sinclair's The Price of Milk was cancelled but the party, in even truer Cuban style, went on) and this 10-film programme is our part of the exchange.

The Cubans did eventually get to see Sinclair's film as well as John O'Shea's classic Don't Let It Get You, Sleeping Dogs, Utu, Ngati and Once Were Warriors, which is a pretty representative list.

And we are getting more than richly repaid with the films in this programme, which include a couple of last century's cinematic landmarks.

Like many communist regimes, the architects of the revolution - which is seldom referred to in Cuba without being preceded by the words "the triumph of" - were quick to capitalise on the potential of cinema.

Within three months of taking over, the Castro Government established the Cuban Institute of Film Art and Industry to take control of production and distribution and it became a model of state-supported film.

Artists, intellectuals and film-makers supported it enthusiastically and until the country's economic woes (caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union) in the 90s, it was, dollar for dollar, probably the world's most productive film industry.

A combination of egalitarianism and the absence of competition kept costs down; dozens of documentaries and shorts, a regular newsreel and an average of half a dozen features were made with a budget that would have made half a Hollywood film.

Some of the better results are on show in this season: Tomas Gutierrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment is the Great Cuban Film, an extraordinarily intelligent examination of post-revolutionary Cuba through the eyes of a single, deeply conflicted bourgeois intellectual. Made in 1968 but set in 1961, it is widely regarded as having redefined political cinema.

The other landmark film is Humberto Solas' Lucia (1969), which is often referred to as the Cuban Gone With The Wind.

Certainly it is epic in scale but it tells three separate stories - set in the 1890s, the 1930s and the 1960s - to remind us that Cuba's struggle for liberation is as old as European settlement.

More modern movies, which make up the rest of the programme, are unknown to this writer with the exception of the hilariously makeshift Plaff!, which played in a festival in the 80s.

But all seemed worth a look and last year's Hurricanes, a co-production with the French and Spanish, may offer an enlightening glimpse of the way forward for an industry which has, like most of Cuba, languished in the 90s.

Movies

* What: Si! Cuba! Cuban Film Festival

* Where and when: Academy Cinema, from today until Oct 13