Sara Gómez: De Cierta Manera + Short Films is screening in the cinema for $15/$7 reduced on Wednesday 4/20 at 7PM.
Sara Gómez’s documentaries are energetic examples of direct cinema where the interaction between the director and the people she films is central to her practice. The films in this program are portraits—of individuals, of cities, of family—and are examples of Gómez’s abiding commitment to populating the frame with the diversity and specificity of those who history could forget.
-Susan Lord
De Cierta Manera (One Way or Another)
1977, 73 min., Cuba
2K digital restoration by Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst in collaboration with Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). Distributed by Janus Films. In Spanish; English subtitles.
De cierta manera is a remarkable film for its portrayal of complex social, racial, and gender relations, and for its inventive strategies of giving such relations a mode of representation adequate to their complexities. The film is renewed with each passing decade by new questions (or old questions but new tools for asking them) about the structures, histories, spaces, everyday practices, and experiences of racialization, gender inequity and violence, machismo and masculinity, marginality, and poverty; and about resistance, decolonization, and anti-imperialism, collective work and dreaming, and the limits and possibilities of the Revolution as a project of modernity and national identity. Until 2007 Sara Gómez was the only woman to make a feature film in Cuba. She remains one of a very few Afro-descendant Cubans to have made feature films at ICAIC about contemporary issues facing Afro-descendent Cubans in general, and women in particular. When Gómez died in 1974, she was in post-production for De cierta manera and the film was completed by Gómez’s colleagues at ICAIC in 1977. In the Documentation Centre of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), writer Victor Fowler found a mimeographed copy of the script called Residencial Miraflores with argument and dialogue by Sara Gómez and Tomás González Pérez. Alberto Pedro Díaz and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea also appear as advisors.
- Susan Lord
Una isla para Miguel
1968, 22 mins, Cuba
Scanned in 4K using the only surviving 35mm print by the Vulnerable Media Lab, Department of Film & Media of the Queen’s University in Kingston (Canada). Restored in 2021 by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory.
Una isla para Miguel takes place on Island of Pines. Miguel, one of 12 children from a poor neighborhood in Havana, was sent to La isla to become a “new man”. The portrait provides the family its dignity and Miguel his youthfulness.
-Susan Lord
Mi Aporte
1969, 33 mins, Cuba
Scanned in 4K using the 35mm image and sound negatives and restored by the Vulnerable Media Lab, Department of Film & Media of the Queen’s University in Kingston (Canada).
In 1972 the Federation of Cuban Women commissioned Gómez to make a film about women’s contribution to the sugar harvest. Mi aporte (My contribution) was the result: a 33 minute “report” on women’s lives 13 years after the “triumph of the Revolution.” The film is a model of feminist consciousness-raising documentary form—self-reflexive, critical, direct. The “report” is a series of testimonials and portraits of how difficult it is for women to contribute as full citizens due to the machismo. The film was censored by the FMC and has rarely been screened on or off the Island.
-Susan Lord
This program is co-presented with New York University and will be followed by a Q&A with Susan Lord, co-editor with Maria Caridad Cumana of The Cinema of Sara Gomez (Indiana University Press, 2021) and Director of the Vulnerable Media Lab at Queen’s University.
