Soy Cuba: Memorias del subdesarollo [Memories of Underdevelopment]

CU 1968, R: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea mit Sergio Corrieri, Daisy Granados, Eslinda Núñez, 97 Min, OmeU

Einer von Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Meisterwerke.

Castros Revolution war für viele Kubaner die Erlösung von einem tyrannischen Regime und der Beginn von wesentlich mehr Freiheit und sozialer Gerechtigkeit.

Sergio ist im Land geblieben, nicht aus Überzeugung, sondern aus Bequemlichkeit und ein bisschen Neugier. Seine Frau hat ihn und Kuba verlassen. Sergio versucht in seiner Luxuswohnung, seine Memoiren zu schreiben, sich zu erinnern an die alte Zeit, die neue zu analysieren und zu verstehen. Es gibt eine Reihe von herausragenden Klassikern von der Karibik-Insel, aber „Memorias del subdesarollo“ gehört zu den größten Filmen der Kinogeschichte überhaupt.

ENGL.

„I remember it as if it were yesterday. The film begins. A dizzying sound of drumbeats invades the movie theatre. Pulsating bodies take the screen. Dozens, hundreds of people, mostly blacks and mestizos, are dancing. Everything is movement and ecstasy. All of a sudden, gunshots ring out.

A man lies on the ground - a lifeless body. Surrounding him, the deafening music and the rhythm continue. The beat is frenzied. The camera travels from face to face in the crowd until it stops at a young black woman. The frame freezes on her trance-lit face. Thus begins Memorias del subdesarrollo, and watching it was like a shock to me. The film navigated between different states - fiction and documentary, past and present, Africa and Europe.

The dialectic narrative took the form of a collage, crafted with an uncommon conceptual and cinematographic rigor.” (Walter Salles) Director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: “I remember that soon after the Revolution, everybody (and I mean everybody) thought that our island could be transformed, from one moment to the next, into a sort of Switzerland of the Caribbean. We had everything we needed: the people, the weapons, the enthusiasm, and the opportunity to re-build our country from scratch.

Only later did we understand that we were basically a farming country, that industrialization would take more time than we had hoped, and that our island was small, poor and underdeveloped. All of a sudden, everything that had once seemed within arm’s reach was further and further away.

The new reality is a radical one. We don’t just need a new economy, new politics, a new society. We need a new way of thinking, and this will take longer. For now, we have to accept who we are and keep fighting, which brings me back to the concept of underdevelopment, but this time, of a moral and aesthetic nature.” 1962. Sergio, un intelectual diletante, se niega a acompañar a su familia que parte para el exilio en Estados Unidos; mientras él queda como un espectador de la realidad, incapaz de integrarse socialmente. “Noticine la pone en primer lugar de las 100 mejores películas del cine de Iberoamérica.” (eluniverso.com)