| Islands / I Lands, NOW—Vista de Cuba |
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Wondering Cuba
El Mégano
CUBA / 1955 / Spanish / B&W / 35mm / 25 min
Director, Editing: Julio García Espinosa
Script: Julio García Espinosa, Alfredo Guevara, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, José Massip
Photography: Jorge Haidú
Music: Juan Blanco
Sound: Luis Newhall
Producer: Moisés Ades
Production Company: Laboratorio Cinematográfico CMQ
Source: National Film Center (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo)
A semi-documentary denouncing the subhuman living conditions of carbon miners in Ciénaga de Zapata in the southern coast of Cuba, the film was banned by the Batista government. A collaboration of Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the founders of ICAIC, the film is considered to be the most important work prior to the Cuban revolutionary cinema, and it was one of those which originated the New Latin American Cinema Movement.
For the First Time
Por primera vez- CUBA / 1967 / Spanish / B&W / 35mm / 10 min
Director, Script: Octavio Cortázar
Photography: José López
Editing: Caíta Villalón
Music: Raúl Gómez
Producer: Manuel J. Mora
Production Company: ICAIC
Source: National Film Center (The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo)
A documentary portraying the work of the mobile-cinema brigade that visits a small mountain village in Sierra Maestra. The villagers’ faces watching Chaplin on screen for the first time ever, full of wonder and joy, are impressive. This is the first film of the author after coming back from Prague, where he studied film direction after the revolution.