Case Studies - The Cuban documentary school: a dynamic international visibility

As part of its heritage documentary program, the MIFC offered a new perspective on the subject on October 19. A case study on the Cuban documentary school, moderated by Magali Kabous and featuring Luis Tejera, Luciano Castillo, Benjamin Léréna and Ernesto Daranas, enabled Market accredited guests to discover the unprecedented importance of this film genre in Cuba's filmic history.

A little-known heritage 

Luciano Castillo, film historian, critic, and director of the Cinematheque de Cuba, opened the discussion with an account of the beginnings of Cuban cinema. Dating back to 1897, Cuban heritage was discreet, with films dominated by dance, music and the melodramatic genre. 

This first period is called "the Lumière period", explains Luciano Castillo, after the filmmakers who wanted to record images of their time and the zeitgeist.

Creation of the ICAIC 

In 1959, Cuban cinema was organized around the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Arts and Industry (ICAIC), created a few months after the end of the Revolution in 1959, which brought Fidel Castro to power.

The creation and consolidation of Cuban cinema represents a real upheaval in the distribution of weight among Latin American cinematographies. Indeed, Luciano Castillo points out that until now, Mexican cinema had been far more recognized than Cuban. But with the creation of the ICAIC, Cuba established itself as a cinematic beacon in Latin America. 

Documentary became increasingly important: filmmakers wanted to use their art and technique to make Cuba a reflection of the world. While fiction gradually developed, documentary became the most important genre. Filmmakers, learning on their own how to make films, turned to the documentary genre, and trained in film schools for technicians, notably around Santiago Alvarez and his Now (1965), or Octavio-Cortez. Cuban documentary cinema soon attracted international interest, with recognition in major competitions such as the Leibzig Documentary Festival. The Golden Dove prize was often won by Cuban artists.

Focus on Noticiero

The Noticiero became the main form of documentary filmmaking in Cuba. In a form that artists wanted to be timeless, with a satirical sense of humor, the Noticiero offered creators great freedom in terms of theme and style. Reporting national and international news, these productions competed with television news.  

Screened in cinemas, Noticiero episodes were broadcast weekly for 30 years. In all, 1,493 episodes were shot and screened, each lasting around twenty minutes, explains Benjamin Léréna, INA's restoration project manager. These episodes offer viewers never-before-seen footage of current events on the island and around the world. 

Images from the era are used, but also images from yesteryear: the episode entitled Viva la Republica uses archive images from before 1959.

A shattered legacy 

Luciano Castillo goes on to describe the difficulties faced by the ICAIC when the socialist bloc collapsed. Indeed, 1990 marked the end of the Cold War and of the socialist bloc to which Cuba belonged. The island experienced a major shortage of film stock, as “the socialist bloc was such a major drain on Cuban cinema," adds Benjamin Léréna. Delivered by the GDR, no more film entered Cuba. "It was the coup de grâce for the country," explains Luciano Castillo. Noticiero came to a halt. 

At the same time, the country was facing electricity restrictions, and had to do without air conditioning. A cataclysm for the ICAIC archives, which spent eleven years without air conditioning. The historian speaks of an "absolute tragedy", which caused the country to begin the 21st century "with a disastrous legacy": a large part of the pre-1959 heritage has disappeared. Works from the 1980s and 1990s were partially spared.

Today's conservation challenges 

This raises the question of protecting and restoring this deteriorated heritage. A necessity made all the more difficult by the search for funding. Luciano Castillo explains that the impetus for the first restorations came from Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola's Film Foundation, as well as the Bologna Cinematheque. Toronto's Kingston University then helped restore Sara Gómez's legacy. For its part, INA has restored the entire Noticiero. 

Benjamin Léréna describes in detail the three years of negotiations it took between the French and Cuban institutions to complete this work. The ICAIC was reluctant to part with almost 1,500 works, for fear that they would not be returned or would be further deteriorated, he explains. In the end, the two entities came to an agreement, and three years after the start of the project, all the episodes were restored, calibrated, and numerised before being sent back to the island in physical and digital format. INA and ICAIC, under a ten-year agreement signed in 2012 and renewed in 2022, share the revenue from rights sales.

But apart from the INA, Cuba's heritage is still struggling to find subsidies for complete restoration. A difficulty mentioned by filmmaker Ernesto Daranas. On the evening of October 19, Daranas presented his documentary Landrián, about the eponymous filmmaker who has been forgotten in Cuba's cinematic history. "I'm Cuban, but I didn't know him," comments Luis Tejera, producer of the film with his company Altahabana, reaffirming the importance of the restoration and the work of Ernesto Daranas, who set about saving the usable filmography of Nicolás Guillén Landrián. With the help of the filmmaker's cinematographer, ten of Landrián's eighteen films have been restored. An "act of justice", according to the technicians who worked on these works, finally making visible images "that have surely never been seen anywhere else in the world", concludes Ernesto Daranas.