A
Vatican for film-makers
How does a Havana film school attract
lavish funding and the likes of Soderbergh
and Spielberg? With a nod and a wink from
Fidel Castro.
Chris Payne. The
Guardian. UK,
November 28, 2003.
If you're unfamiliar with Cuba's cinematic
heritage, you might assume that a film school
run with Fidel Castro's help would be coaching
its students in flag-waving reconstructions
of the Bay of Pigs or promo reels exhorting
the nation's nickel workers to greater heights
of production. Hardly any films produced
on the island since the 1960s have achieved
distribution in the UK. The Buena Vista
Social Club, the internationally successful
documentary about a group of old-time Havana
musicians, which became the soundtrack of
every middle-class dinner party, was made
by the German director Wim Wenders.
A 50-minute drive from Havana, the international
film and television school immediately strikes
the visitor as a colonial compound in the
tropics. A staff of over 200 full-time cooks,
maids, gardeners, builders, drivers, translators
and security staff cater for the film student's
every possible need. Internet access is
three cents a minute, cable TV plays in
the 24-hour cafeteria and, on Sundays, there
are even bus trips to Varadero, the 20-mile
strip of unblemished white sand that is
the Caribbean's largest tourist resort.
The school's Cuban director, Julio García
Espinosa, explains the justification behind
such expenditure. "When I was at film
school in Rome in the 1950s, Alessandro
Bonavetti, a famous Italian director of
the time, asked us students what the most
important thing was for film-makers to possess.
We of course answered 'passion', 'talent',
'vision', but he just shook his head. 'Health,'
was his reply. It was true. We were so poor.
We wrote on waste paper collected from the
streets. So when I had the chance to set
up this school I knew the students must
be free to concentrate on their work."
In the cafeteria, dilemmas that face every
film student are debated with added passion.
"There's no way I'm leaving here just
to make more films like they do in Europe
or Hollywood," says Marina from Sao
Paulo, Brazil. "Most of them are just
escapism." Her boyfriend, Victor, from
Cartagena in Colombia, shakes his head.
"South America is full of all these
messianic directors preaching this and that
to audiences that are not interested any
more. I think Hollywood sometimes gets it
right. If you want to reach people, you
must entertain. I think I'm going to make
comedies. But dark ones, of course."
Sandy Lieberson, one-time studio boss of
MGM and 20th Century Fox and now director
of Film London, has been teaching a three-week
crash course in international film production
at the school for the past six years. Young
professionals already working in the Latin
American media have flown in for eight weeks'
training in the art of packaging films.
In a class of 18, each student pitches two
ideas and, after discussion, they vote for
the best five. Desiree from the Dominican
Republic scores big points for her satire
about a group of slacker friends who stand
in the presidential elections as a joke,
only for the politics to become alarmingly
real. So, too, does Susanna from Chile,
with a tragicomic story of a transsexual
who is so convinced he is a woman that when
told he is HIV positive, he takes the positive
to mean pregnant.
Of the winners, two are from Cuba. The
first is a story of a young man's sexual
awakening while on national service; the
second about a group of a Cuban balseros
(boat people) whose terrifying attempt to
float the 90 miles from Cuba to Miami on
a home-made raft is documented on video.
The following weeks will be spent on budgeting
and scheduling the concepts. The school
is proud that, of the ideas that have been
developed in the workshop, several made
it into production when the students returned
to their home countries, and it expects
a lot more in the years to come.
This last point gets to the heart of what
the school is about. In the 1960s, García
was among a group of left-wing academics
who witnessed what they saw as the "colonial
decimation" of Latin American cinema.
"In the 1930s and 1940s there were
lots of great films being shown in our cinemas,
then it dropped right off," he says.
"The American studios claimed it was
due to market forces, but of course it wasn't.
If we wanted one of their hits they would
force us to take nine other films of lower
quality. The glossy-produced films with
big budgets were always put in the best
cinemas, so Latin films screened in the
less well-kept theatres. The public therefore
assumed their own films were inherently
inferior."
When the revolution came in 1959, García
and his colleagues were determined to break
the studios' grip on Cuban culture. The
Cuban institute for art and the cinema industry
was hurriedly assembled and Hollywood was
informed that, from now on, Cuba would be
taking equal numbers of films from Latin
America and the rest of the world. In addition,
Latin American films would get the chance
to play in the best cinemas. "If they
wanted to dump their inferior films on us
from now on, that was fine," says García.
The studios said that we were forcing films
on the public that they didn't want to see
and that cinema attendance would fall. This
didn't happen. Attendances stayed the same.
We broke the myth." The plan had little
effect on film production, however. Hollywood
went from strength to blockbuster-fuelled
strength, while film production in debt-blighted
Latin America fell disastrously.
The idea for the film school occurred to
García 17 years ago. As he saw it,
what the continent desperately needed was
a "factory of creative energy"
where talented people from all over the
world would feed off each other. Colombian
writer Gabriel García Márquez
has a house in Havana, and when García
turned up to suggest the idea, Castro happened
to be there. That same evening, the plan
was agreed. I wondered how a novelist and
an ex-guerrilla leader came to get so excited
about building a film school. "I think
they are both frustrated film-makers,"
grins García.
The school's vision of not only educating
its students in the how-tos of film-making
but also trying to change the globe's cinematic
landscape has drawn some of the world's
top cinema talent to its lecture theatres.
Steven Soderbergh got quite a grilling from
some of the students, unhappy about his
drugs 'n' guns portrayal of Mexico in Traffic.
Spielberg enthused about the energy of the
place, spoke out against the embargo and
was reported as saying that he'd love to
make a film in Cuba. But the students' favourite
remains Francis Ford Coppola, who visited
in 1998: he hung around the cafe for two
days and cooked pasta for everyone in the
canteen.
The reason the Americans can bypass the
US travel ban to the island lies with Castro.
García and García Márquez
persuaded Castro to make the school a non-government
organisation. "You're not actually
standing on Cuban soil," say the school's
Juan José and Oriel Rodriguez. "This
place is a sort of Vatican for film-makers."
Nevertheless, water, petrol and electricity,
tightly rationed on the rest of the island,
are supplied at a discount by the Cuban
authorities.
Back in Havana, where the young film-makers
are not wrapped in the warm embrace of the
school, there is frustration at the control
exercised by Cuba's film commission over
everything from script development to distribution.
To develop or finance a script they have
to submit it to a committee of 14 bureaucrats,
none of whom has made a film for 10 years.
Horror films, anything zany or vaguely "experimental",
they say, gets short shrift.
Felipe, a 24-year-old trainee cameraman,
tells me of his struggle to make a short
film about a cake delivery boy getting trapped
in a lift, who is seized by a fit of claustrophobia,
eats his cake and then slaughters the family
who are waiting for him. "For starters,
I'm a cameraman, so I would be rejected
because I'm supposed to be a cameraman,
not a director. And then there's the bloodbath
ending..."
Pavel, on the other hand, like generations
of film-makers around the world facing insurmountable
bureaucracy, is learning to do it for himself.
Working on pop promos and adverts, sometimes
for foreign companies using the city as
a location, he is typical of Havana's burgeoning
class of autonomos (self-employed) chasing
the fula (dollar) since the government introduced
a degree of free-market capitalism into
the economy. He owns a digital camera, and
an Avid Xpress editing system on his computer
which he rents out.
Pavel's immediate problem, however, is
attracting investment. The 28-year-old has
connections abroad, "but there is no
way I can set up a bank account and receive
$10,000 of foreign investment without things
having to become 'official'", by which
he means nightmarishly bureaucratic. Finally,
should Pavel surmount this problem his investors
must be clear on one thing: they will not
see any money in Cuba. In Cuba's centrally
organised economy, where the president himself
is a film lover, cinema-goers only pay two
pesos a ticket (about five pence).
It was then that I heard about a comedy-drama
called Fruits in the Cafe, which the producers
are claiming will be Cuba's first fully
independent feature film. Over the summer
Daniel and Regis from the school worked
on the movie, directed by one of the country's
rising stars, Humberto Padrón. Interestingly,
the budget of the film had come from the
owner of one of the country's better-known
private restaurants or paladars. A meeting
was called at La Guarida, possibly the most
famous paladar. Spielberg happened to be
there, too, and there was talk of a shot
at the Sundance film festival.
In the Cuban authorities' way of negotiating
slippery developments, Fruits of the Cafe
officially "does not exist". But
the institute is in fact more than aware
of the film, and importantly granted the
producers vital location permissions to
shoot. Should they agree to distribute Fruits
in the Cafe when it is ready, possibly at
the same time as Havana's international
film festival next month, their decision
will become a landmark in Cuban cinema.
Pavel, Felipe and the Cubans at the film
school may also sink more than a few Havana
Clubs, too.
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