Cuban film at Nonstop - Monday, Aug. 16

Tomas Gutierrez-Alea's "Memories of Underdevelopment" (1968)
(followed by discussion with Bob Devine)
Monday, August 16
7:00 PM
Nonstop Institute
305 N. Walnut St., Yellow Springs
free admission

Tomas Gutierrez-Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment/ Memorias del Subdesarrollo (1968, Cuba) interrogates the manner in which people continue to carry the mentality of the underdeveloped within them, and speculates on the means for moving beyond the cultural, intellectual, emotional and ideological state of underdevelopment or poverty to make a full revolution. The film has also been described by the UK's Guardian as "one of the best films ever made about the skeptical individual's place in the march of history." The film, an example of New Latin American Cinema (1960s-70s) deals with the period between the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis and uses documentary-style narrative sections together with newsreel footage, clips of Hollywood films, and recorded speeches by Fidel Castro and JFK. Gutierez-Alea was one of the founding young filmmakers of ICAIC, the internationally respected Cuban film collective/school, and is widely known in the US for Strawberry and Chocolate /Fresa y Chocolate), nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in1993.

Bob Devine continues his presentation of revolutionary international narrative films produced from 1925 to 1996 as part of this workshop series. The public is invited to attend the individual films or to engage these important historical films as an integrated series that runs every Monday through August 23 (cost of each screening is pay as you are able). For this series Devine has programmed narrative films that are radical or oppositional in terms of (a) production circumstance, (b) form, (c) content, or (d) circumstance of reception. All films will be followed by discussions of their respective historical and cultural contexts, in order to discern patterns across cultures that might be considered revolutionary. Selected films in the series are from Russia, the U.S., Algeria, Cuba, Senegal and Zimbabwe. For more information on the workshop series see http://nonstopinstitute.org/workshops/workshop-in-revolutionary-film/

Bob Devine is a film scholar, filmmaker, educator, and internationally respected public access media consultant.

For further information:
Contact Chris Hill (chris.hill@nonstopinstitute.org), 767-2327