Memories of Underdevelopment

A Cuban film from 1968 based on the novel.

Wealthy bourgeois lives post-Cuban revolution. A film about alienation and the history of Cuba. He just seems to be bored all the time. I was as well.

It doesn't really go too deep into cultural realms and mainly centres around this guy. His wife left for USA, so he sleeps with a younger girl and gets in trouble for it. Or nearly does.

Not really a bad word said about it online. It's possible to portray alienation from a whole country without making the audience bored, right?

Apparently there's a lot of people (or was) in Cuba like this guy who didn't adjust to life at the time. The author has just recently published "Memories of Overdevelopment".

"The film is told in a highly subjective point of view through a fragmented narrative that resembles the way memories function."
Someone on wikipedia.org wrote that. If the film manages to hold your concentration, I imagine they're probably right.

I felt that with the revolutionary and Cuba being independent the protagonist felt everyone was all the same; dull, lifeless.

Soy Cuba

This is a Soviet/Cuban film from 1964 by Mikhail Kalatozov. It wasn't received very well at the time from either of those countries.

Whilst being shot in B&W it has colour filters that exaggerate contrast. This makes clouds, trees, and other such materials look a bright white, and darker stuff very black.

The camera work in this is really impressive "always moving and soaring over the sugar fields, swooping in and out of urban buildings, following characters down narrow streets."

It has 4 short stories ranging from farmers, students, prostitution, revolution. It's not propaganda, but a beautiful film.

It's difficult to go into much depth. I don't have a degree in film to tell you about the cinematography or Russian history, and you don't need either to watch this. All I can give you is my opinion; this is one of the most gorgeous films I've seen, so much that I went out and bought another by the same director.