“I deeply regret the death of Doña María Salud Ramírez Caballero, Mama Coco, a tireless woman and example of life, who was an inspiration for this beloved character who went around the world,” reported Roberto Monroy, Secretary of Tourism of Michoacán (west ), the state of origin.

According to local media, Doña María had turned 109 last September and died in her hometown of Santa Fe de la Laguna, near the touristic Patzcuaro Lake, famous for its colorful celebration of the traditional Day of the Dead.

After the success of the film, which portrays this deep-rooted Mexican holiday, the old woman had become a kind of celebrity, with tourists visiting her to take photos with her due to her remarkable resemblance to her animated character, highlighted media Mexicans.

Coco tells the story of a boy who embarks on a fantastic journey to the world of the dead to learn the history of her ancestors, in particular her great-great-grandfather, Mama Coco’s father. “The greatest thanks to the people of Mexico. Coco would not exist without her culture and her infinitely beautiful traditions,” Lee Unkrich, the film’s director, said when he received the Oscar in March 2018.

(Taken from The World)

Raúl Valdés González (Raupa), one of those in charge of the event’s audiovisual campaign together with Nelson Ponce Sánchez, commented that both the Festival’s poster and advertisement allude to the chain of events that take place in a movie theater, such as a kind of ritual for those who prefer to enjoy a good movie on the big screen.

“They refer to the great party that represents the arrival of this cultural event for lovers of the seventh art,” said Raupa.

In the House of the Festival, Nelson Ponce stressed that with his posters for the event he always tries to generate controversy on debatable topics and the image for the 43rd edition was no exception, because he insists on how the existence of new multimedia platforms, especially after The covid-19 pandemic affects the consumption of cinema in traditional spaces.

Yumey Besú Payo, director of the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, stated that at the end of the call, on August 30, more than 2,200 films had been registered, a high number in terms of film production in the region, which will force specialists and organizers to an arduous selection process.

200 posters and around 220 unpublished scripts have been submitted to the contest, which, after going through the official selection, will opt for the prize in both categories.

As a novelty, by decision of the organizing committee, the delivery of the Arrecife Award is included, a new award that will recognize the Latin American work that best reflects the queer theme or another linked to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual and Intersex community (LGBTIQ +) .

Not only the films in competition will be eligible for this diversity award, Besú Payo clarified.

He pointed out that the passport will be resumed as a usual way of accessing the capital’s cinemas during the film event.

The 43rd International Festival of New Latin American Cinema will take place in Havana from December 1 to 11, 2022 and its main purpose will be to recognize and disseminate cinematographic works that contribute, based on their significance and artistic values, to the enrichment and reaffirmation of the Latin American and Caribbean cultural identity.

Acclaimed at the Venice festival, where it had its world premiere, the film, produced by the Netflix streaming platform, has sparked controversy over the provocative treatment given to that icon of cinema that is Marilyn Monroe.

Blonde is an adaptation of the homonymous novel by the writer Joyce Carol Oates, which mixes real and fictional data to delve into the obsessions and traumatic life of Norma Jean, beyond the mythical character created by Hollywood.

Supporters and critics of the film agree in praising Cuban actress Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe, in an intense, unsweetened portrait of the legendary platinum blonde.

(Taken from Tribune of Havana)

“My next film will be number 50, I think it’s a good time to stop. My idea, in principle, is not to make more movies and focus on writing, these stories and, well, now I’m thinking more of a novel, “he said.

He added that “the movie business has changed; human stories are no longer so interesting”.

Literature, on the contrary, is “an obsessive work”, according to Allen. “You spend long periods of time thinking about a single word or a phrase, for several hours, trying to figure out how to make that sentence work. Really good writers I know spend a day or two polishing up a sentence,” he emphasized.

The film director is sure that writing a script “is much looser: there are a lot of dialogues and the mere outlines of the scenes, it changes all the time and you don’t work on it as much”.

His final work, of which few details are still known, will resemble one of Woody Allen’s best films. “It will be similar to ‘Match Point’, exciting, dramatic and also sinister”, confessed the filmmaker.

Born on December 1, 1935 into a Jewish family, Allen began his career as a humorist writing jokes and scripts for television shows.

His debut as a film director took place in 1968, when he shot ‘Take the money and run’. It was a false documentary, a genre that the director would later cultivate in some of his subsequent creations. Allen’s films such as ‘Annie Hall’, ‘Bullets Over Broadway’ or ‘Manhattan’ are considered classic works of world cinema.

Throughout his successful career, Allen has touched on various genres and styles, from melodrama (‘The Purple Rose of Cairo’, 1985) and criminal comedy (‘Bullets on Broadway’, 1994), to the ‘thriller’ drama (‘Match point’, 2005 and ‘Cassandra’s dream’, 2007).

(Taken from RT in Spanish)

Hamlet’s words quickly spread through social networks.
To clarify this issue, Cubacine spoke with Tania Delgado, vice president of Icaic, who is responsible for the Institute’s international relations.

Cubacine: Is it true that the ICAIC contacted Lester Hamlet to discuss questions about his stay abroad? Why?

Tania Delgado: It is true that the Icaic Protocol area contacted him, but not exactly because of his travel time, but rather because he traveled with an official passport requested from Icaic.

The use of the official passport is authorized for missions abroad that the institutions assume as their own. This document, unlike the current passport, is only valid within the dates for which it is requested.

Upon returning to Cuba, the bearer must deliver the official passport to the institution, as it is not a personal document.

As more than a month had elapsed from the scheduled date for Lester’s return to the country, the head of the Icaic Protocol area, forced to inquire about the official passport, contacted him in writing using WhatsApp messaging to find out if he was already in our country and request the return of the official passport.

Cubacine: Why did Lester Hamlet leave the country with an official passport?

Tania Delgado: Lester traveled to Mexico with an official passport to participate in the La Isla Residencia Community Project in the state of Quintana Roo.

There he would screen a series of his films and give a script workshop. It is normal practice for ICAIC to support filmmakers in projects or events that are of interest to Cuban cinematography.

Cubacine: Is it true that you were informed that he was sanctioned for exceeding the time of use of the official passport?

Tania Delgado: No. In the exchange of WhatsApp messages between Lester and the Icaic official, the latter asked him if he was already in the country. Lester asked to call him by phone and in the telephone communication, he informed the official that he had not yet returned to Cuba and that his decision was not to do so.

The Icaic official replied that this was a personal decision, but that he had traveled with the official passport and that it should be returned to the institution.

Subsequently, Lester asked if it was true that due to his decision not to return, he could be subject to a sanction of limitation of entry to the country.

At no time was this an idea enunciated by the Icaic official, nor was the reason for the conversation to inform him of any sanction.

Cubacine: Can Icaic withdraw a Cuban filmmaker’s right to enter the country?

Tania Delgado: No. The Icaic is not empowered to take a measure of this nature. As the Minister of Culture and the president of Icaic stated on their Twitter accounts, he can return to the country whenever he wishes.

Cubacine: What is your opinion of this situation?

Tania Delgado: It is painful to say the least that a filmmaker with the career of Lester Hamlet blames Icaic for forcing him to make the decision to stay out of Cuba when it is strictly personal.

(Taken from the Icaic Facebook Profile)

Here is just one sample of what was said about that film, at the time, in this case by Spanish critic Beatriz Maldivia: “The film is, in short, a string of endless dialogues, poorly written, totally unrelated, and with no other purpose other than allowing Andy Garcia and Cabrera Infante to disseminate a kind of dissertation on Cuba that would be rejected by any children’s magazine. It is cinematically – not only ideologically – null and void.”

After a huge publicity campaign during its preparation, and the announcement that it would be the most expensive film by a Cuban exile (read counterrevolutionary), Plantados, directed by Lilo Vilaplana, with a screenplay by Ángel Santiesteban, Juan Manuel Cao and the director himself, was released in Miami.

The plan was to fictionally recreate “the nobility and endurance of Cuban political prisoners in the 1960s and 1970s in the face of the atrocities of the Castro-Communist prison regime.”

Within 24 hours, the film was posted on social networks, something unusual for an expensive premiere, films that are customarily presented at festivals around the world first, to be make money and allow the investment to be recovered, as was unsuccessfully attempted with The Lost City, rejected here and there, as no good.

Someone on social media noted this strange decision to launch the film on the fly without recovering a penny, asking, “But why are they doing this and not trying to make a profit?

There are two obvious reasons for this hasty gamble. First, to support the current subversive campaign against Cuba, presenting a propagandistic, one-dimensional image of the subject they address, making no reference to the context, like the fact that more than of a few of the prisoners portrayed were criminals, and secondly, the filmmakers’ vacuous illusion that they have produced a masterpiece, capable of responding – as they expressly state – to what was exposed in The Wasp Network (Olivier Assayas, 2019), a film that outraged them for violating the empire’s instructions and presenting real heroes, as opposed to the “heroes” they now attempt to resurrect from the past as a “message of rebellion,” addressed to generations that did not live those days.

The ploy of rewriting history and leaving out inconvenient facts is an old trick: the United States lost the war in Vietnam, but years later Rambo appeared, capable of winning another vengeful invasion on his own, and comforting those longing for a past that never existed.

The counterrevolution lost more than 60 years ago, despite its efforts to re-conquer Cuba by blood, fire and maneuvers of all kinds, and now resorts to the standard deceptions of a fictional film to sentimentally reconstruct the facts, at its convenience.

In the artistic field – as professional critics will undoubtedly note, if they pay any attention at all to the film – Plantados makes clear the negative consequences of a lousy melodrama that confuses the time setting, divides the protagonists into very good guys and bloodthirsty bad guys, with rambling dialogues in which every expression has a premeditated purpose, a repetitive script full of arguments timeworn to the point of exhaustion, sappy music and scenes of beatings and murders in prisons and labor camps that fill a good part of its almost two hours of footage. Long segments are marked by tear-jerking grandiloquence regarding the conflicts, and no skills of the trade are evident in the development of a contemporary act of vengeance, which owes much to the worst of Hollywood, despite the film’s multi-million dollar budget.

Some clear-headed minds at the Miami Film Festival, where the film premiered a few days ago, must have realized that Plantados would bomb and, although they accepted it, the film was not given the importance it deserved, according to director Lilo Vilaplana.

He complained on his Facebook page, that the Festival had given the film “fifth-rate treatment,” failing to promote it “not in advertising, nowhere. It is a film made in exile, by artists living here; it should have been given another kind of importance.”

Indignantly – perhaps anticipating the artistic failure so painful for any creator – he raised the political stakes: “The Miami Film Festival’s disrespect for the historic exile and its complicity with the Castro dictatorship is shameful.”

And to make sure there would be no doubt as to the intentions of the film, Vilaplana asserts that the Festival organization does not care for films like Plantados, since they “like those that build bridges, that say we must unite, but with the dictatorship, we do not negotiate.”

And Vilaplana goes further: “Those films that invite people to go to Cuba are complicit with the dictatorship, and that regime must be overthrown, because it has done much harm to Cubans… They (the Festival directors) did not want the film to be present, and I felt it even in the people who were attending the Festival, they were upset that the film was there.”

The film will find an audience among the exile community’s fanatics and there will be many who will promote it as a “revealing work,” without acknowledging the manipulation of emotions it employs, as a basic principle of counterrevolutionary propaganda serving a subversive plan that does not rest.

But hatred and art never go hand in hand. Good luck artistically next time, director, and get over this one.

(Taken from Granma)

Starting from scratch, film after film, Raúl Pérez Ureta got better, working to become an essential director of photography, to whose death, at 79 years of age, we can only respond by putting a hand to the chest and taking a long bow.

Pérez Ureta is the architect, in images, of a good number of Cuban films that remained forever in the imagination of viewers. The composition of lighting, shots, counterplanes, angles, the blessed magical ability to capture the aesthetic thinking of directors, suggesting variants and even going beyond the original proposals.

The story of this modest, deliberate man is that of many young people who, following the triumph of the Revolution, had the opportunity to change the uncertain destiny he had previously faced, given his humble origins.

From the foothills of the Escambra, he came to Havana to work as a janitor who one good day decided to knock on the door of the new Cuban Film Institute (Icaic). He got started by doing whatever was needed – assistant cameraman for cartoons – until Santiago Alvarez ran into him in a hallway, desperate because he urgently needed a soundman. The young Raúl assured him that he knew more than he really did, and from then on, became a member of the impetuousdirector’s crew.

An entire school of young people learned to do things on the fly alongside Alvarez, especially in the production of the Noticiero Icaic newsreel. This was where Pérez Ureta made his great contribution, as cameraman for more than 800 editions between1965 and 1984.

His resume includes work as head of photography for more than forty documentaries (and the same number as cameraman or soundman) and, his greatest achievement, as director of photography, in seventy fictional works in which he left an imprint of the highest quality. Suffice it to mention, among them, La película de Ana, Mujer transparente, La vida es silbar, Un paraíso bajo las estrellas, Martí, el ojo del canario, Suite Habana, Amor vertical and Hacerse el sueco.

Raúl contributed to international cinematography, as well, for many years simultaneously teaching at the San Antonio de los Baños International Film School.

In 2010, he became the first cinematographer in Cuba to win the National Film Award and today, on the occasion of his departure, it is comforting to say goodbye to this man and friend, recalling how he lived his life and left a remarkable body of work.

(Taken from Granma)

Arriving at the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Industry and Art (Icaic) in 1961 as a simple apprentice, Tabío made documentaries on various subjects before making his feature-length debut with Se permuta (1984), a film that inspired me, that very year, to write in these pages: “For Tabío it was important for viewers to not only have fun and laugh, but also reflect on what they were seeing, to feel part of the story and its possible solutions. If his film is an engaging dialogue from beginning to end, it is because “the Cuban”, the everyday, the popular and unshaven, is there…”

Arriving at the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Industry and Art (Icaic) in 1961 as a simple apprentice, Tabío made documentaries on various subjects before making his feature-length debut with Se permuta (1984), a film that inspired me, that very year, to write in these pages: “For Tabío it was important for viewers to be not only have fun and laugh, but also reflect on what they were seeing, to feel part of the story and its possible solutions. If his film is an engaging dialogue from beginning to end, it is because “the Cuban”, the everyday, the popular and unshaven, is there…”

This was a constant in his filmmaking, marked by experimentation, a willingness to disregard the conventional and, at the same time, very effectively employ critical social comedy, extracting from reality what fiction could make transcendent.

Se permuta, Plaff, Lista de espera, El cuerno de la abundancia, were films that brought millions of spectators to our theaters, and it is enough to close our eyes for a moment to remember those days when going to the movies was an event, and Juan Carlos Tabío became the magician of “serious laughter,” adored by an audience that applauded throughout the screening.

Serious laughter, because in his stories there was nothing mechanically included, and every provocation, with humor as the narrative basis of forceful arguments, came from a social and human context he knew well, an indispensable requirement to make the critical function of art an effective instrument, as long as one has talent and sensitivity, and Tabío had plenty.

When Tomás Gutiérrez Alea got sick in the middle of filming Fresa y Chocolate (1993), he found in Tabío that indispensable other self to become co-director. It was then that a fusion emerged of characters not given to repeating themselves in a drama that did not lack a touch of humor. Alea was more focused on the intellectual aspect of the conflict, Tabío drawing on his popular roots, and with the emotional power of the script by Senel Paz, Gutiérrez Alea himself, would make the film an international event. An audacious combination that both directors would repeat in Guantanamera (1995).

Aunque estés lejos, El elefante y la bicicleta, La inolvidable Dolly Back, (the short film about impersonation that happily disconcerted viewers) and others, are also among the memorable works of Tabío, who was a screenwriter and professor as well, widely acclaimed both nationally and internationally.

The 2014 National Prize for Film was awarded to this intelligent artist, with vast wisdom and culture, with whom it was always a pleasure to discuss art, or life itself, and see him move from an amicable tone to the most open emotionality, those outbursts that made him as authentic as his films.

The world of cinema, and especially Cubans, will miss him, and not only because of his transcendence as a filmmaker.

(Taken from Granma)

Dividing the festival in two phases was the solution its organizers found amid the difficult situation unleashed by Covid-19 worldwide.

Not to cancel the traditional festival in December, it was decided to hold an exhibition festival, from Dec.3 to 13, which has screened in this capital nearly 100 contemporary and high-quality audiovisual works.

The Latin America in Perspective and International Contemporary Panorama sections overfilled 23 y 12, Riviera, Yara, La Rampa and Acapulco movie theaters, of this capital, for ten days, where strict health measures were complied with and –to protect the audience- operated with reduced capacity.

The films screened in December were from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Honduras, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Colombia, among other countries.

The second stage, film contest as such, will take place March 11 through 21, 2021, also including lectures, theme presentations and discussion and a debate on the Latin American youth film making.

(Taken from Prensa Latina)

Cinema itself, conditioned by prejudice, has from the beginning opposed any sexual manifestation that was not considered “correct” and then, when it was convenient to end this censorship, there was a new set of rules to play by, again imposed by others.

These were early films in which homosexuality was represented in a stereotypical way, with characters dominated by lust, perversity, criminal instincts, who received the sobering punishment of death at the end of the plot.

Or alternately, effeminate characters, seen early on in silent film comedies and later exploited as personalities whose sexual preferences were not defined, was identified with complicit chuckles and elbowing by viewers given the accentuated clichés used in their portrayal (Our Betters, George Cukor, 1932).

In the silent short film Behind the Screen (2016), Chaplin’s character works carrying bags in a film studio. There, the beautiful Edna Purviance is not accepted as an actress and decides to dress up as a man so that she won’t be thrown out. Chaplin knows this and kisses her. A stage hand surprises them and tries to make a pass at Chaplin with feminine gestures, but the king of comedy gives him the boot. This the beginning of cinematic sexual misunderstandings, repeated, since then, a thousand times.

Although European cinema had its problems, the environment was freer than in the U.S. movie industry when it came to issues of sexual diversity. Born as a big business, Hollywood was shaken when in the 1930s the so-called Legion of Decency and other groups organized boycotts of films considered offensive. The Hays Code, in effect through 1967, allowed for the cutting of any film, or altering of content related to “insulting topics” such as homosexuality.

No explicit references to sexual diversity were required in the code devised by Bill Hays, but directors managed to create clues that could be interpreted by the viewer, without drawing censors’ attention.

Such was the case of the literary classic The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett) brought to the screens by the legendary John Huston, in 1941. A character in the novel (played by Peter Lore), who walks behind the prized statuette, is a homosexual crushed time and again by the tough detective Sam Spade. But unable to describe him openly, the director uses flowery music to introduce the character and has him rest the handle of his cane alongside his mouth.

There are plenty of examples of famous scissoring. Cut in Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960) was a scene in which the slave played by Toni Curtis bathes his master (Laurence Olivier), and both of them indirectly discuss their homosexuality by referring to the taste of oysters and snails.

Prejudices did not disappear with the Hays code and it has sometimes been directors themselves who decided to “soften” dramatic situations when recreating important literary works. This can be seen in The Color Purple (Spielberg, 1985), in which the protagonist’s lesbian orientation is practically erased. Other films have aroused mixed reactions in certain sectors of society, such as when Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee had two tough guys in the Old West fall wildly in love (Brokeback Mountain, 2005).

Today, issues of sexual diversity are addressed in the most varied productions and seen in festivals around the world, featuring conflicts that nudge viewers to reflect on old prejudices, which may now be less evident in cinema, but continue to persist in much of the international community.

(Source: Granma)