Known for Acting
In Havana in the nineteen sixties, there were 140 movie theaters. Only a dozen remain today. For ten years, the cinema industry was a pillar of the Cuban Revolution, but the regime’s hardening and the economic recession precipitated its decline. Fifty years later, only a dozen movie theaters are still running in Havana, while a new generation of bold filmmakers struggles for the very existence of Cuban cinema. In the Heat of the Cold Years tells the story of Revolutionary Cuban cinema through the memories of a choral of elder filmmakers, such as Luciano Castillo, the director of the national film archives, as he scrambles for the preservation of this crumbling cultural legacy, and through a group of young Cuban filmmakers struggling to make their first feature film.
Pioneering Spanish filmmaker, actress and producer Margarita Alexandre (1923-2015) reminisces about her life and career during a trip to Cuba, where she worked during the early years of the Cuban Revolution.
Cuba is not a country for young gays. Teen rent boy Reinier falls in love with a mate in the slum soccer field in their neighbourhood in Havana. Although obsessed with moneymaking to hold up his baby, teen wife, and wife's grandma, gambler Reinier always fails to get the stroke of luck he looks for. At the same time he cannot help being infatuated by Yosvani. Handsome Yosvani will give up his older, wealthy girlfriend (whom he hooked up to pay for a lavish life in the big city), and the work he does for her father, a loan thug, so much in love he is with Reinier. But the boys would fight hard to keep this love in the reckless Havana streets.
A lesbian, an aspiring actor, an aspiring singer, a low-class marriage, a neighborhood community and 2 renowned directors have memorable less-than-24-hour-long experiences while living in/visiting the capital of Cuba.
Amor Crónico follows Grammy-nominated, Cuban-born CuCu Diamantes as she embarks on a whirlwind tour of her home country. Interweaving glamorous live performances with a fictional romance, the film pays tribute to the history of cinema in surreal fashion. Backed by a high energy Latin soundtrack, Cucu's journey is a visual love poem to the sites, sounds, and people of Cuba.
In the Cuba of these times, where everyone sells something, the young Nácar wants to sell her only property, the family vault.
An unclaimed fortune, grown for centuries in a British bank account, becomes a potential windfall for Bernadito Castiñeiras and the residents of the tiny village of Yaragüey, Cuba. To receive his massive inheritance check, Bernadito must prove his lineage to the Castiñeiras nuns who first populated the region. In an isolated and impoverished town where many residents share the same surname, a feud breaks out between the "Castiñeiras" and "Castiñeyras" families.
A look at the life and work of Cuban filmmaker Tomas Gutierrez Alea.
Using found footage, still photographs, animations, and occasional original footage, “The Mist in the Palm Trees” purports to tell the story of Santiago Bergson, writer, physicist, and sometime pornographer who sold arms to the Resistance in France, flirted with the Nazis, collaborated on Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” broadcast and helped build the A-Bomb.
Mercedes and Pedro, Cuban producers and screenwriters, travel to Spain to close an agreement with Alberto, a Spanish producer. Together, they try to make a film about Cuban reality. A movie about those who leave the island, those who return, but also those who still want to leave but cannot. A simple idea that will slowly become more complicated because Spaniards and Cubans have a very different point of view on this reality.
