Havana Film Festival NY: Opening Night
Text: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Photos: Francisco Collazo
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The 10th anniversary of the Havana Film Festival in New York opened tonight at the Directors’ Guild of America in Manhattan.
The star of the evening was Cuban actor Jorge Perugorria, who has played the leading role in some of the most popular movies in modern Cuban cinema, including “Guantanamera,” “Fresa y Chocolate” (“Strawberry and Chocolate”), “Lista de Espera” (“The Waiting List”), and “Cosas Que Deje en La Habana” (“Things I Left Behind in Havana”).
His most recent role is that of Bernardito in the Juan Carlos Tabio film, “El Cuerno de la Abundancia” (“The Horn of Plenty”):
The film, which was released in Cuba and Spain in 2008, tells a story that occurs in the fictional town of Yaraguey, where residents with an unusual last name (and there are lots of them) learn that they may stand to gain part of an enormous inheritance. As each branch of the family scrambles to put together the documents and the money they’ll need to prove their pedigree, all sorts of typical Cuban family and neighborhood dramas unfold–and keep the audience laughing for a full 90 minutes.
After the film, Perugorria and co-star Mirtha Ibarra, who has often played alongside Perugorria, explained that the plot was inspired by a true story in Cuba. Perugorria told the audience that he and the film’s director, Juan Carlos Tabio, even received threatening letters from the family who had been fictionalized in “El Cuerno de la Abundancia,” concerned that the film would undermine their chances of resolving their own inheritance drama.
The fate of the family with the real inheritance drama isn’t known, but Perugorria and Ibarra indicated that the film was very well-received in Cuba, where it won two prizes in the 2008 Havana Film Festival. After all, Perugorria said, the themes in the film are familiar to Cubans, and “El Cuerno de la Abundancia” reflects a certain aspect of Cuban reality that translates well to international audiences, too.
April 17th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Julie, thanks for sharing all of those interesting Cuban films. I will add them to my NetFlix que. Hopefully, they’re available.
It’s nice to hear about some films that are about aspects of Latin America other than violence. While violence does exist there–and everywhere else in the world–I think most mainstream and many so-called indy-film’s tend to rely on the cliche that much of Latin America is practically a war zone.
The New York Times Bob Herbert wrote an editorial this week that should have Americans looking at the violence within our own borders. Since 2001 nearly 120,000 Americans have been murdered in the U.S.–mostly as a result of gun violence, he noted in his April 13 Op-Ed column.