Love Of Country Hits The Screen

When the widow of Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea reached out to Margherita Tortora, senior lecturer in Spanish at Yale, to ask if she would consider a celebration of her late husband’s work on the 20th anniversary of his death, Tortora jumped at the opportunity. She knew that she had limited resources to put on a film festival, but that hadn’t stopped her in the past. Alea’s widow, the director and actress Mirta Ibarra, was excited. This way, both students and members of the public could benefit from a re-evaluation of the work of one of the most influential directors in Cuban history.

This Thursday through Saturday, those months of planning will come to fruition when a local series about contemporary Latin American cinema comes to a close with a five-film tribute to Alea, showcasing the Cuban director’s resonant, ambivalent patriotism. Four of his most celebrated films, as well as a documentary about the director, will play at Yale’s Luce Hall auditorium at 34 Hillhouse Avenue. All of the screenings are free and open to the public.

When you watch a Tomás Gutiérrez Alea film, even decades after the director’s death, you can’t help but think that a true love of one’s country can only emerge from those willing to criticize its shortcomings. In his camera’s eye, post-revolutionary Cuba is a place of frustrating contradictions: vitality and decay; solidarity and prejudice; humor and pride and fear and poverty. These are the contradictions of his homeland, and he is just as unwilling to abandon Cuba as he is unable to passively accept its faults.

“Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is probably the greatest Cuban filmmaker of all time,” Tortora said on a recent episode of WNHH’s Deep Focus. ​“He and Humberto Solás are the classic masters of post-revolutionary filmmaking in Cuba, and they were both on the ground floor of starting the whole film culture and industry in that country.”

Tortora, who has been teaching Spanish and film studies at Yale for 23 years, is a more-than-reliable guide to the history and impact of Cuban cinema. Or, for that matter, just about any Spanish-speaking cinema this side of the Atlantic. She is the former artistic director of the New England Festival of Ibero American Cinema (NEFIAC), as well as the founder and one-woman force behind the Latino and Iberian Film Festival at Yale (LIFFY). The current series, which wraps up this weekend, is an extension of LIFFY, which formally occurs each November.

Working with a small budget from the Macmillan Center’s Council for Latin American & Iberian Studies, Tortora has managed to bring films and filmmakers from Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, and Colombia to the Elm City over the past few months. After each screening, the actors and directors stick around to answer questions from the audience.

“Having these movies screened with the filmmakers and the actors [in attendance], and with the combined audience of students and the New Haven community, gives the immigrants in this city a voice and a face,” Tortora said. ​“It makes people see them as real human beings, and not just as people that have to be kept out by a wall. When you understand each other, it’s harder to hate each other.”

For a late-February screening of Raymundo, a documentary about a left-wing Argentine filmmaker who was one of the tens of thousands of people disappeared by the country’s military regime in the mid-1970s, that understanding came about through a spirited discussion between producer Juana Sapire and the Argentine immigrants in attendance. These current New Haveners expressed their frustrations and fears about the right-wing presidency of Mauricio Macri. They spoke about how, just a few decades ago and only a continent away, their neighbors and family members suffered the same fate as this documentary’s filmmaker-subject.

But the movies in this series, and the interactions between filmmakers and audiences around those movies, have not always been tied to social turmoil and personal tragedy. For a mid-April screening of Soy Andina II, a work-in-progress documentary about a Peruvian woman who lived in the United States for 20 years before coming back to a small village in the Andes, filmmaker Mitch Teplitsky brought a tape recorder to capture the audience’s thoughts about the complicated reality of returning to one’s native country after years of separation. He also picked up some tips on how to edit the final cut of his film.

For this final weekend of the extended festival, Tortora has arranged for the Cuban filmmaker Mirta Ibarra, Alea’s widow and former star actress, to fly from her home in the Caribbean up to New Haven to participate in this celebration of her late husband’s work.

The tribute kicks off this Thursday night at 6 p.m. with Memories of Underdevelopment, Alea’s 1968 masterpiece about individual uncertainty in the face of world historical events. The movie tells the story of a bourgeois furniture salesman and aspiring writer who finds himself caught between a series of apocalypses: the Communist revolution of 1959, the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, and the coming Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963. Unable to process the sudden political power of countrymen he has always assumed to be backwards and ​“underdeveloped,” he throws himself reflexively into frustrated love affairs which only distance him further from his country’s stratified past and its uncertain future.

The rest of the films in the series take a similarly nuanced and introspective look at different stages of Cuban history. But they also play up the humor and joy that are so central to Alea’s vision of a country’s ability to both persevere and evolve towards justice.

Up to a Certain Point (1985), which plays on Thursday at 8 p.m., explores the hypocrisies of machismo in a supposedly egalitarian society, while still delighting in the playfulness of romantic discovery. Strawberry and Chocolate (1993), which plays on Friday at 7 p.m., criticizes an official intolerance of homosexuality among a group otherwise dedicated to ​“revolutionary” principles. And Guantanamera (1995), which plays on Saturday at 6 p.m., unfolds as a romantic comedy and road trip movie set against the backdrop of Cuba’s ​“Special Period,” a time of intense poverty after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

At a time when the relationship between Cuba and the U.S. is changing so suddenly and so dramatically, a look back at Alea’s filmography promises some insight on the humor and suffering and wary idealism with which its people greeted moments of great national transition. It also presents a rare opportunity to learn about a culture and a history from a perspective of love and criticism.

“To be a true patriot you have to be able to see what the flaws are and want to make them better,” Tortora said, reflecting on Alea’s body of work. ​“A patriot wants to make their country better.”

To listen to the complete interview with Margherita Tortora, click on or download the audio below, or subscribe to WNHH’s new ​“WNHH Arts Mix” podcast on Soundcloud or iTunes.

All of the screenings in A Tribute to Tomás Gutiérrez Alea will take place at 34 Hillhouse Avenue between Thursday, April 21st and Saturday, April 23rd. They are all free and open to the public. Click here for more details and directions.