Cuba

After the triumph of the Revolution on January 1, 1959, the newly established government’s first action as far as culture was concerned, was the creation of the Cuban Institute of Film Art and Industry (ICAIC). The institution’s first ten years were known as the Golden Age of Cuba’s moviemaking, as critics say. There was a time, especially in 1968, when Humberto Solás and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Titón), eventfully the country’s greatest movie directors of all time, shot Lucia and Memories of the Underdevelopment. The latter is penciled in as one of the all-time top-100 films according to the Movie-clubs International Federation.In recent years, some movies worth mentioning are Strawberry and Chocolate, directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío, and No-Show List, directed by Juan Carlos Tabío.Last but not least on the list of key players in this brief history of Cuban moviemaking is the ICAIC’s Latin American Newsreel, firstly directed by Alfredo Guevara, present-day ICAIC Director. The job was later on relayed to a Santiago Alvarez, Cuba’s greatest documentary maker.Since 1979, Cuba conducts an annual event, the Latin American New Film International Festival, that takes place every year in Havana. The new market opened by the Havana’s Festival, the biggest of its kind in all Latin America, is a consequence of the International School of Moviemaking, Television and Video in San Antonio de los Baños, founded in 1986 and sponsored by the New Latin American Film Foundation.Backed up by Colombian Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel García Márquez, students learn about direction, script writing, photography and editing. Hundreds of Third World’s youngsters have graduated from this school and their knowledge is already bearing fruit all over the moviemaking world.For its part, the Havana-based Foundation is aimed at making sure the existence and continuity of the Third World's film industry through the promotion distribution of its movies.