Adela Legrá

Five years after the passing of the iconic filmmaker Humberto Solas, one of the founders of the New Latin American Cinema, partners, friends and family gather to evoke aspects of the life and work of Cuban artist of universal size.

Maité

In his award-winning film Lucía, Humberto Solás interpreted the theme of Cuba’s hundred years' struggle in an entirely novel way to create an epic in three separate episodes, each centred around a woman called Lucía and each unfolding in a different period of Cuban history, corresponding to the three stages of colonialism (1895), neocolonialism (1930) and socialist revolution (1968). The three episodes also present us with "Lucías" of different social classes. Solás described his film in this way: "The woman's role always lays bare the contradictions of a period and makes them explicit: Lucía is not a film about women, it's a film about society."

The Castro revolution was just consolidating its power when, in 1961, over 100,000 students were sent from their schools into the countryside to teach the peasants there how to read. Coinciding with the Bay of Pigs invasion, in this docudrama, 15-year-old Mario (Salvador Wood) has come to a tiny village in the Zapata swamps and gradually wins the villagers over to his task. At the same time, he receives an education in the realities of rural life from the hard-working peasants.

Amor Crónico follows Grammy-nominated, Cuban-born CuCu Diamantes as she embarks on a whirlwind tour of her home country. Interweaving glamorous live performances with a fictional romance, the film pays tribute to the history of cinema in surreal fashion. Backed by a high energy Latin soundtrack, Cucu's journey is a visual love poem to the sites, sounds, and people of Cuba.

A young girl joins the guerrilla

In Santa Fe de Tierra Firme, an imaginary Latin American country, the indigenous dictator Santos Banderas rules with an iron fist. A group of rebels trying to seize power by force while some liberals try a change of government legally.

In Havana in the nineteen sixties, there were 140 movie theaters. Only a dozen remain today. For ten years, the cinema industry was a pillar of the Cuban Revolution, but the regime’s hardening and the economic recession precipitated its decline. Fifty years later, only a dozen movie theaters are still running in Havana, while a new generation of bold filmmakers struggles for the very existence of Cuban cinema. In the Heat of the Cold Years tells the story of Revolutionary Cuban cinema through the memories of a choral of elder filmmakers, such as Luciano Castillo, the director of the national film archives, as he scrambles for the preservation of this crumbling cultural legacy, and through a group of young Cuban filmmakers struggling to make their first feature film.