Venezuelan filmmaker Fina Torres’ torrid Havana-made comedy Habana Eva, and Unfinished Spaces (which was made by Americans and actually not part of LAFF’s Cuban focus per se but was about Cuba’s schools of the arts, and like Eva, has already been reviewed in a previous LAFF dispatch by your far flung film correspondent), the International Spotlight included: Director/writer Fernando Perez’s Suite Habana, a “tone poem” about day in the life of Cuba; director/producer Estelo Bravo’s documentary Operation Peter Pan: Flying Back to Cuba, about the return visit to Castro’s Cuba of some of the children who fled Fidel’s revolution in the early 1960s through this U.S. State Department resettlement program; and perhaps most notably, director/co-writer Gerardo Chijona’s extraordinary, unforgettable, riveting Ticket To Paradise.
This remarkably candid feature film helps to redefine so-called “socialist realism,” which, under the Stalinists, was often neither “socialist” nor “realist,” but frequently propagandistic in the crudest sense. However, as Ansen noted at a screening of Ticket To Paradise: “People under the illusion that Cuba only makes terribly self flattering movies have to see this film.” Instead of brawny proletarians and peasants riding shiny tractors in a workers’ paradise, viewers of the ironically named Paradise will see images of: AIDs, prostitution, drug use, suicide, s*xual abuse/ incest, crime, homos*xuality, graphic ******, s*x acts, homelessness, dumpster diving, alienated youth, underground heavy metal concerts, Cuba’s counterculture, etc.
Posted By: Marta Fernandez
Monday, August 1st 2011 at 2:28PM
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