Compass South (Cuba)
Trinity - 18.30h & 21.00h
Film screenings:
Memories of Underdevelopment +
Strawberry & Chocolate
Plus intro & live Cuban salsa
(Spanish?? Read it here)
These films have been kindly donated by the ICAIC (Cuban Film Institute). We ask you support our gift to ICAIC, of offi ce materials in short supply due to the trade embargo, by making a small donation either on the event front desk or at the bar.
Memorias del Subdesarrollo / Memories of Underdevelopment (15) (Alea, 1968, 97m)
Sergio, a middle-class Cuban intellectual, decides to stay in Cuba despite his wife, family and friends joining the exodus to Miami in the wake of the Revolution. Set historically in the period between the Bay of Pigs offensive and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Sergio tries to understand the new Cuba and his place within it.
Ultimately cast as an outsider, he ponders the state of his country whilst engaging in a series of relationships with women. Alea uses Sergio’s relationship with each woman as a means of approaching a consideration of aspects of Cuba’s own underdeveloped nature. Using elements of documentary footage of historical moments in Cuba’s near past, Memories of Underdevelopment was one of the most sophisticated movies to come out of Cuba at its time, and remains a cinematically exciting enquiry into a fascinating moment in Cuba’s recent history.
Fresa y Chocolate / Strawberry & Chocolate (15) (Alea, 1994, 108m)
Set against the faded grandeur of Havana’s crumbling colonial facades, Strawberry & Chocolate was one of Alea’s last films, and continues to present a real investigation into the nuances and complexities of the country he loves. Set one year before the Mariel boatlift exodus, Strawberry & Chocolate is the story of a friendship between two very different Cubans. Diego is a flamboyant, cultured gay man and an ardent lover of the arts; David is a serious, naïve Marxist
driven by loyalty to the regime, and intention to report Diego to the authorities for his counter-revolutionary behaviour. “I knew he was a homosexual,” David says of their initial meeting in the ice-cream parlour, “there was chocolate, and he chose strawberry.” But the more time the two men spend together, the more David’s certainties become effaced. A fi lm about tolerance,
Strawberry & Chocolate examines freedom of expression, surveillance, and the flaws of revolutionary Cuban society.
Since this film was made Castro has formally apologised for Cuba’s policy on homosexuality, which is now legal.
(click here for the map to the Trinity Centre)
