Guittierez Alea: Memories of Underdevelopment - KarazwLaimoon

Date: 3 April 2014

Title: Memories of Underdevelopment (Cuba)
Director: Tomas Guitterez Alea
Date: 1968
Language: Spanish (English Subtitles)
Duration: 97 minutes

Time: 7:00 pm
Location: Mouawad Museum (Beirut, Lebanon)

Link to IMDB: Click Here
Trailer from YouTube: Click Here
The Guardian: Click Here
Julia Lesage article: Click Here
Slant Magazine: Click Here
New York Times: Click Here

Time Out London: Click Here


Synopsis: (Adapted from Wikipedia: Click Here)
Memories of Underdevelopment is a 1968 Cuban film. Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the story is based on a novel by Edmundo Desnoes. It was Alea's fifth film, and probably his most famous worldwide. The film gathered several awards at international film festivals. It was elected the 144th best movie of all time in the Sight & Sound 2012 poll.

Sergio, a wealthy bourgeois aspiring writer, decides to stay in Cuba even though his wife and friends flee to Miami. Sergio looks back over the changes in Cuba, from the Cuban Revolution to the missile crisis, the effect of living in an underdeveloped country, and his relations with his girlfriends Elena and Hanna. Memories of Underdevelopment is a complex character study of alienation during the turmoil of social changes. The film is told in a highly subjective point of view through a fragmented narrative that resembles the way memories function.

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: December 11, 1928 – April 16, 1996) was a Cuban filmmaker. He wrote and directed more than 20 features, documentaries, and short films, which are known for his sharp insight into post-Revolutionary Cuba, and possess a delicate balance between dedication to the revolution and criticism of the social, economic, and political conditions of the country.

Gutiérrez's work is representative of a cinematic movement occurring in the 1960s and 1970s known collectively as the New Latin American Cinema. This collective movement, also referred to by various writers by specific names such as "Third Cinema", "Cine Libre", and "Imperfect Cinema," was concerned largely with the problems of neocolonialism and cultural identity. The movement rejected both the commercial perfection of the Hollywood style, and the auteur-oriented European art cinema, for a cinema created as a tool for political and social change. Due not in a small part to the filmmakers’ lack of resources, aesthetic was of secondary importance to cinema’s social function. The movement's main goal was to create films in which the viewer became an active, self-aware participant in the discourse of the film. Viewers were presented with an analysis of a current problem within society that as of that time had no clear solution, hoping to make the audience aware of the problem and to leave the theater willing to become actors of social change.