Memories of Underdevelopment

A unique cinematic portrait of Havana and an acclaimed work by a Cuban director who deserves to be rediscovered in Poland, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea.

In 1968, as a wave of student protests sweeps the world, Alea makes a film depicting a country dealing with the aftermath of the communist revolution. At the centre of the story is 38-year-old Sergio (the nonchalant Sergio Corrieri), a distant relative of Sorrentino’s characters. He is an aspiring bourgeois writer who – with a sense of superiority – bids farewell to his loved ones who, mourning the Batista dictatorship, flee to Florida in the early 1960s. While Sergio stays on the island, he longs to live a European life and willingly exercises his class privilege to seduce younger women. But the private is political, and dangerous to boot – especially in post-colonial Havana, whose façades are adorned with images of Castro and Lenin.

Today, Alea’s combination of fictional scenes and real-life documentary footage still impresses with both formal and ideological audacity. The film offers a bitterly ironic, ambiguous portrait of masculinity in crisis. Simultaneously, it calls for intellectual autonomy: the right to make mistakes and to question.

Mariusz Mikliński

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1928-1996) was a Cuban director and screenwriter. He co-founded the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry in 1959. His first feature film was The Twelve Chairs (1962), an adaptation of Ilf and Petrov’s comic novel, and he gained wider recognition with a comedy Death of a Bureaucrat (1966) and his next and most famous film, Memories of Underdevelopment (1968). In later years he was dividing his time between directing and teaching young filmmakers.