De cierta manera
Cuba / 77 min / 1974 / fiction
in Spanish with English subtitles
Direction: Sara Gómez
Screenplay: Tomás González Pérez, Sara Gómez
Cinematography: Luís García Mesa
Editing: Ivan Arocha
Producers: Camilo Vives
Cast: Mario Balmaseda, Yolanda Cuéllar, Mario Limonta
A teacher named Yolanda meets a factory worker named Mario and they fall in love. One of Mario’s colleagues is going astray, and the children who Yolanda teaches are often aggressive; their respective approaches to these external issues will also inform their burgeoning relationship. Yet context is a malleable concept for Gómez and moves far beyond the couple’s immediate surroundings, as her restless curiosity expands outward in all directions at once, leaving fiction behind to embrace the essay and the documentary and taking real people along for the ride: Afro-Cuban traditions, post-Revolution social policy, the biography of a boxer turned musician, urban development, the shadow cast by colonialism, the roots of machismo. Story and context are insufficient concepts anyway when they’re as hopelessly intertwined as here: the love between two people born out of a remarkable director’s expression of love for Cuba, community, and cinema itself, ambivalent, hopeful, assured. - James Lattimer
