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CUBA: Film Frenzy
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
IPS News - Dec 14, 2007
http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=40474
CUBA: Film Frenzy
by Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Dec 14 (IPS) - Mara Martnez and her husband go home every
evening after participating in a ritual that is repeated every
December, when the Cuban capital hosts the New Latin American Film
Festival, an audiovisual feast that revolutionises the citys routine
for two weeks every year. During the festival the cinemas are awakened
from the tor**** in which they languish the rest of the year, when few
new films are screened. People rush feverishly from place to place,
disregarding the shortage of public trans****t or the battles to get in
to see a highly praised film.
"Its an op****tunity to see a film in comfort, meet up with friends,
and enjoy something completely different after the working day,"
Martnez told IPS. "The Film Festival is like the Book Fair, both are
sacred events to me," said this retired nurse, 63, about the Dec. 4-14
filmfest.
Martnez says the two weeks of the festival are exceptional,
particularly because of the number and variety of new films she can
see. The rest of the year she has to make do with the state television
fare of mostly U.S. films, because she lives on the outskirts of
Havana, a long way from the premire circuit of movie theatres.
The economic crisis that broke out in the 1990s hit cinemas hard all
over the island. Many of them were left derelict, or converted to other
purposes, such as housing, discothques, shops, public toilets, offices
or theatres.
The paradox is that in Cuba, unlike other countries, the cinemas were
not closed down because of lack of audiences but because of physical
deterioration.
By the early years of this century, half the cinemas had closed in
Havana alone. Those in outlying neighbourhoods were the most heavily
affected by the decline, although some famous movie theatres on the San
Rafael boulevard, a busy shopping area in the heart of Havana, also
closed down.
Martnez and her husband Jos(c) Zayas discovered their mutual passion for
films early on. Even while they were on their honeymoon at the Capri
hotel in Havana, they went out one day to see a musical film from the
former Czechoslovakia.
They both prefer films based on real life. Zayas mentioned, for
instance, the Brazilian film "Cidade de Deus" (City of God) by Fernando
Meirelles, which won the Grand Coral First Prize at the 2002 Havana
Festival. It ****trays the violence in the favelas (shanty towns) of Rio
de Janeiro, inspired by a real life story.
"Films like these keep you awake," Zayas, 62, told IPS. In the peace
and quiet of his home, after working an eight-hour day in a machine
shop, he tends to nod off in front of the television, unless one of
those films in which fiction gives way to reality is on.
The same thirst for reality was shared by the hundreds of people who
crowded the Acapulco cinema in the capital on Dec. 9 to see "Das Leben
der Anderen" (The Lives of Others) by German director Florian Henckel
von Donnersmarck, awarded the Oscar for best foreign language film this
year.
The feature-length film is set in the final years of East Germany
(GDR), before its reunification with West Germany (FRG). It shows the
working methods of the Stasi, the secret police of the formerly
socialist country, which advised the Cuban authorities on the training
of its intelligence agents in the mid-1970s.
The public screening of this film could be interpreted as a further
sign of openness on the part of the Cuban government, in a year which
has already seen a lively debate in intellectual circles about the
cultural restrictions that were applied in previous decades, and the
need to create op****tunities for dialogue, the confrontation of ideas
and diversity.
Alfredo Guevara, the coordinator of the Festival, said at the
inauguration on Dec. 4 that President Fidel Castro, two years ago,
"called for an end to inertia, immobility, conformity, complacency,
indifference, voluntary or coerced silence, settled routines and
uncritical acceptance, which lead irremediably to the corruption of the
soul."
Guevara also mentioned acting President Ral Castros speech on Jul.
26, which launched wide-ranging popular debates on the island from
August to October, the results of which are still unknown.
Ral Castro asked people to change concepts and methods that were
appropriate in their time, but have now been overtaken by life itself.
The right course of action is not to close the doors, but to let the
fresh air in, opening the windows wide. Our response should be creating
with work after work, by artists and institutions with real designs
that deserve to be called cultural, said Guevara, who founded the Cuban
Institute of Cinematographic Arts and Industry (ICAIC) in 1959.
The festival did not escape the usual tensions with the United States.
U.S. filmmaker Brian de Palma was denied a visa by Wa****ngton to attend
the presentation of his film "Redacted", at the opening of this 29th
Havana Film Festival, where close to 500 movies are being shown, and
not only from Latin America.
Far away from the bustling crowds around the city centre cinemas,
Martnez and Zayas go to the Glauber Rocha movie theatre, at the
headquarters of the New Latin American Film Foundation, with the same
eagerness that as children and teenagers they went to see Mexican
melodramas and Westerns from the U.S.
"Its entertainment, and it improves quality of life," says Martnez,
who usually goes with her friends from the University for Older Adults,
a government initiative which offers an op****tunity for people over 60
to prepare for the challenges of ageing.
"Quality of life is not just about eating vegetables and doing
exercises," she said. "While theyre at the cinema, older adults arent
worrying about illnesses and medicines."
The Glauber Rocha movie theatre puts on year-round weekly film shows
for older adults as part of the national programme to care for this
population group, which makes up 16.2 percent of Cubas 11.2 million
people. (END/2007)
*
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