A Vatican For Film-Makers
By Chris Payne
The Guardian
28 November, 2003If you're unfamiliar with Cuba's cinematic heritage, you might assume that a film school run with Fidel Castro's help would be coaching its students in flag-waving reconstructions of the Bay of Pigs or promo reels exhorting the nation's nickel workers to greater heights of production. Hardly any films produced on the island since the 1960s have achieved distribution in the UK. The Buena Vista Social Club, the internationally successful documentary about a group of old-time Havana musicians, which became the soundtrack of every middle-class dinner party, was made by the German director Wim Wenders.
A 50-minute drive from Havana, the international film and television school immediately strikes the visitor as a colonial compound in the tropics. A staff of over 200 full-time cooks, maids, gardeners, builders, drivers, translators and security staff cater for the film student's every possible need. Internet access is three cents a minute, cable TV plays in the 24-hour cafeteria and, on Sundays, there are even bus trips to Varadero, the 20-mile strip of unblemished white sand that is the Caribbean's largest tourist resort.
The school's Cuban director, Julio García Espinosa, explains the justification behind such expenditure. "When I was at film school in Rome in the 1950s, Alessandro Bonavetti, a famous Italian director of the time, asked us students what the most important thing was for film-makers to possess. We of course answered 'passion', 'talent', 'vision', but he just shook his head. 'Health,' was his reply. It was true. We were so poor. We wrote on waste paper collected from the streets. So when I had the chance to set up this school I knew the students must be free to concentrate on their work."
In the cafeteria, dilemmas that face every film student are debated with added passion. "There's no way I'm leaving here just to make more films like they do in Europe or Hollywood," says Marina from Sao Paulo, Brazil. "Most of them are just escapism." Her boyfriend, Victor, from Cartagena in Colombia, shakes his head. "South America is full of all these messianic directors preaching this and that to audiences that are not interested any more. I think Hollywood sometimes gets it right. If you want to reach people, you must entertain. I think I'm going to make comedies. But dark ones, of course."
Sandy Lieberson, one-time studio boss of MGM and 20th Century Fox and now director of Film London, has been teaching a three-week crash course in international film production at the school for the past six years. Young professionals already working in the Latin American media have flown in for eight weeks' training in the art of packaging films. In a class of 18, each student pitches two ideas and, after discussion, they vote for the best five. Desiree from the Dominican Republic scores big points for her satire about a group of slacker friends who stand in the presidential elections as a joke, only for the politics to become alarmingly real. So, too, does Susanna from Chile, with a tragicomic story of a transsexual who is so convinced he is a woman that when told he is HIV positive, he takes the positive to mean pregnant.
Of the winners, two are from Cuba. The first is a story of a young man's sexual awakening while on national service; the second about a group of a Cuban balseros (boat people) whose terrifying attempt to float the 90 miles from Cuba to Miami on a home-made raft is documented on video. The following weeks will be spent on budgeting and scheduling the concepts. The school is proud that, of the ideas that have been developed in the workshop, several made it into production when the students returned to their home countries, and it expects a lot more in the years to come.
This last point gets to the heart of what the school is about. In the 1960s, García was among a group of left-wing academics who witnessed what they saw as the "colonial decimation" of Latin American cinema. "In the 1930s and 1940s there were lots of great films being shown in our cinemas, then it dropped right off," he says. "The American studios claimed it was due to market forces, but of course it wasn't. If we wanted one of their hits they would force us to take nine other films of lower quality. The glossy-produced films with big budgets were always put in the best cinemas, so Latin films screened in the less well-kept theatres. The public therefore assumed their own films were inherently inferior."
When the revolution came in 1959, García and his colleagues were determined to break the studios' grip on Cuban culture. The Cuban institute for art and the cinema industry was hurriedly assembled and Hollywood was informed that, from now on, Cuba would be taking equal numbers of films from Latin America and the rest of the world. In addition, Latin American films would get the chance to play in the best cinemas. "If they wanted to dump their inferior films on us from now on, that was fine," says García. The studios said that we were forcing films on the public that they didn't want to see and that cinema attendance would fall. This didn't happen. Attendances stayed the same. We broke the myth." The plan had little effect on film production, however. Hollywood went from strength to blockbuster-fuelled strength, while film production in debt-blighted Latin America fell disastrously.
The idea for the film school occurred to García 17 years ago. As he saw it, what the continent desperately needed was a "factory of creative energy" where talented people from all over the world would feed off each other. Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez has a house in Havana, and when García turned up to suggest the idea, Castro happened to be there. That same evening, the plan was agreed. I wondered how a novelist and an ex-guerrilla leader came to get so excited about building a film school. "I think they are both frustrated film-makers," grins García.
The school's vision of not only educating its students in the how-tos of film-making but also trying to change the globe's cinematic landscape has drawn some of the world's top cinema talent to its lecture theatres. Steven Soderbergh got quite a grilling from some of the students, unhappy about his drugs 'n' guns portrayal of Mexico in Traffic. Spielberg enthused about the energy of the place, spoke out against the embargo and was reported as saying that he'd love to make a film in Cuba. But the students' favourite remains Francis Ford Coppola, who visited in 1998: he hung around the cafe for two days and cooked pasta for everyone in the canteen.
The reason the Americans can bypass the US travel ban to the island lies with Castro. García and García Márquez persuaded Castro to make the school a non-government organisation. "You're not actually standing on Cuban soil," say the school's Juan José and Oriel Rodriguez. "This place is a sort of Vatican for film-makers." Nevertheless, water, petrol and electricity, tightly rationed on the rest of the island, are supplied at a discount by the Cuban authorities.
Back in Havana, where the young film-makers are not wrapped in the warm embrace of the school, there is frustration at the control exercised by Cuba's film commission over everything from script development to distribution. To develop or finance a script they have to submit it to a committee of 14 bureaucrats, none of whom has made a film for 10 years. Horror films, anything zany or vaguely "experimental", they say, gets short shrift.
Felipe, a 24-year-old trainee cameraman, tells me of his struggle to make a short film about a cake delivery boy getting trapped in a lift, who is seized by a fit of claustrophobia, eats his cake and then slaughters the family who are waiting for him. "For starters, I'm a cameraman, so I would be rejected because I'm supposed to be a cameraman, not a director. And then there's the bloodbath ending..."
Pavel, on the other hand, like generations of film-makers around the world facing insurmountable bureaucracy, is learning to do it for himself. Working on pop promos and adverts, sometimes for foreign companies using the city as a location, he is typical of Havana's burgeoning class of autonomos (self-employed) chasing the fula (dollar) since the government introduced a degree of free-market capitalism into the economy. He owns a digital camera, and an Avid Xpress editing system on his computer which he rents out.
Pavel's immediate problem, however, is attracting investment. The 28-year-old has connections abroad, "but there is no way I can set up a bank account and receive $10,000 of foreign investment without things having to become 'official'", by which he means nightmarishly bureaucratic. Finally, should Pavel surmount this problem his investors must be clear on one thing: they will not see any money in Cuba. In Cuba's centrally organised economy, where the president himself is a film lover, cinema-goers only pay two pesos a ticket (about five pence).
It was then that I heard about a comedy-drama called Fruits in the Cafe, which the producers are claiming will be Cuba's first fully independent feature film. Over the summer Daniel and Regis from the school worked on the movie, directed by one of the country's rising stars, Humberto Padrón. Interestingly, the budget of the film had come from the owner of one of the country's better-known private restaurants or paladars. A meeting was called at La Guarida, possibly the most famous paladar. Spielberg happened to be there, too, and there was talk of a shot at the Sundance film festival.
In the Cuban authorities' way of negotiating slippery developments, Fruits of the Cafe officially "does not exist". But the institute is in fact more than aware of the film, and importantly granted the producers vital location permissions to shoot. Should they agree to distribute Fruits in the Cafe when it is ready, possibly at the same time as Havana's international film festival next month, their decision will become a landmark in Cuban cinema. Pavel, Felipe and the Cubans at the film school may also sink more than a few Havana Clubs, too.