Angles: Women Working in Film and Video (1994)

Oe Festival del Nuevo Cine Latino Americano Cuban festival a cultural eye opener B Y OAL POA he situation in La Habana, Cuba is very hard for the people. The United States blockade has created a serious shortage of goods, including food and medicine, for Cubanos and has affected all forms of exchange between the U.S. and Cuba, including cultural productions. Under these circumstances, folks in the U.S. have little chance to learn about folks in Cuba. Media coverage of Fidel Castro, his fleeing daughter and defecting athletes, overshadows all other aspects of life in Cuba. In this context, one small way of resisting the blockade is to make attempts to learn more about, and to engage in dialogue with Cuban culture. There are many other ways activists are directly challenging the blockade and organizing against it. All of these efforts are important to changing the situation. I went to the 15th Festival del Nuevo Cine Latino Americano with this goal in mind, and because it is one of the most important gatherings of Latin American film and videomakers. As a filmmaker and as program director for Women In the Director’s Chair, it was important for me to attend the festival. On a personal level, I found the festival was a rare opportunity to be in a community with other Latino film and videomakers, in which we could dialogue and theorize about our specific cultural, political and aesthetic approaches to film and video. Latino cinema has developed what I believe to be the most coherent political and aesthetic theories of film and video in social movements. Yet the history and documentation of Latino cinema over the last 20 years is seriously lacking in film education in the U\S.. This effectively erases the profound effect Latino filmmakers have had on world cinema. Although Cuba is struggling economically to survive, the Cuban festival was hugely successful because the government places great importance on cultural events. Hundreds of works were screened, including a retrospective of Cinema Novo, a retrospective of Chicano work from the USS. and a series of works from Holland and Italy. Attendees came from all over the world, and there was a large group of Latino film and videomakers from the U.S. The festival focused on new features, a few by women, from all over Latin America. Among these was a new film by Maria Luisa Bemberg, De eso no se habla, which I hope will be distributed in the U.S. because Bemberg is one of the few women from Latin America whose ouevre North Americans have been able to follow. She is an amazing director of meditative narratives, revealing the inner souls of characters with incredible fluency. MARIA SEN FF Pe te Going to the festival gave me the opportunity to see and select several works that we would show later at the Women in the Director’s Chair International Film Festival, which had a special focus on Latina media makers. The following were among those: La Muchacha (Mexico) by Dora Guerra is about a young woman experiencing culture shock when she goes to work in the city. In Otofial (Mexico) by Maria Novaro, a woman, who lives alone with her mother, creates a ficticious world. Por la Vida by Olivia Olea (U.S) presents the stories of Latino immigrants who sell goods on the streets of Los Angeles. Chilean Ximena Arrieta has been working in Santiago with a collective video production group, Grupo Proceso, for about 10 years. Since the fall of the dictatorship, the group has been creating videos which focus on youth, the environment, women’s issues and human rights. What impresses me most about the work is the group’s obvious commitment to rigorous political analysis, covering a wide range of topics, and their productivity. Arrieta has produced more than 30 tapes in the last five years, all of them covering different aspects of the cultural and political lives of the Chilean people. An example is La Historia Tiene Nombre De Mujer, which documents the women’s movement in Chile. WIDC also presented a program of works by the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Television, located just outside La Habana. This internationally attended and recognized film school features such teachers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tomas Gutierrez Alea and Julio Garcia Espinosa. The films and videos, all by women, are fantastic. It is student work in the best sense of the word: exploratory, risky, original, smart and true to these women’s experiences. For financial reasons and because the works generally are not screened in the U.S., much of this work does not have English subtitles. WIDC exhibited the works in Spanish as an affirmation that for thousands in the U.S. the language is a primary form of communication. I hoped the works would challenge non-Spanish speaking -festivalgoers to try to learn some Spanish, so they also could traverse borders and engage in cultural dialogue. Délida Maria Benfield, a film and video-maker, is the Program Director of the Chicago-based Women in the Director’s Chair. This article is an edited version of a longer piece that originally appeared in Chair Chat, a Women in the Director’s Chair publication. Volume 2 Number3 @ 5