Shot in Havana and processed at Phil Hoffman's Film Farm, Marcel Beltrán Fernández's Casa de la noche explores those same histories from the point of view of an insider, as a lived experience that is evocatively mirrored through ripped and torn celluloid.
I Like to Dream: The True Story of Felipe Cardeña (Short film), shot by the artist Desiderio, shows us Felipe, as a mime walking through the streets of Havana, through the cross-over testimonies of many people who knew or heard of him: street mimes like him, but also bartenders, street vendors, street people, as well as the famous Cuban writer Yoss, author of an essay on the artist. A hybrid film, halfway between the journalistic documentary and the dreamlike and symbolic reconstruction of the work of Cardeña, the film reconstructs Felipe’s passage through the streets of Havana, through witnesses, but also through Felipe’s performances (such as the large floral poster, with Che’s face, still hanging in a street in Old Havana), the suggestions of his works, his dreamlike atmospheres and colors.
Television plays an important role in the life of the people of Havana. Despite there being only one program - the daily broadcast of the Telenovela is a most welcome distraction from the boring everyday life in the capital of Cuba. The movie watches enthusiastic and less enthusiastic viewers, and the almost holy people who are repairing the precious, mostly Russian devices.
Mari is a woman trapped in a man’s body. She tells us about life as a transsexual in Cuba and all the pain that comes with it: parental rejection, the men she’s loved who hurt her deeply, unscrupulous doctors… But she continues to fight, trying to make her life just a little better every day.
While in Havana, a musician gets involved with a crippled man and his beautiful wife... with deadly results.
The film is liberally inspired by the period when Eça de Queiroz was Portuguese Consul in Cuba, when still a Spanish colony. Eça de Queiroz struggles against local authorities in his defense of Chinese workers, brought to the sugar plantations by greedy middlemen and exploited as slaves. Two parallel stories unfold, that of a Chinese girl which Eça de Queiroz saves from the clutches of one of the island’s most powerful slave owners, and the other of a romance involving a young American woman on holidays in Havana.
Raul, Camilo and Armando are three friends who, forced by the crisis, plan to kill a neighbor’s cat to eat meat in the “Periodo Especial” in Cuba (1989).
Allan Jones stars as hotshot baseball player Johnny Norton, in Havana for spring training. It turns out that Johnny has a beautiful singing voice, but only when he's suffering from a cold. Enterprising nightclub manager Barney Crane (William Frawley) attempts to inflict poor Johnny with cold germs, resulting in unchecked zaniness whenever our hero recovers sufficiently to lose his voice. The film's 63-minute running time manages to accommodate the drunken comedy relief of Hugh O'Connell and Jack Norton, and an abundance of musical numbers, courtesy of Allan Jones, Jane Frazee, the Horton Dancing Group, the Jivin' Jacks and Jills and Grace & Nicco.
A rampant, street level story of mentorship and everyday heroism in tough circumstances. An inner city coach's son, estranged in his youth from his father, spends five years on ball fields in inner city Oakland and Havana, following the lives of two extraordinary youth baseball coaches, Roscoe in Oakland and Nicolas in Havana. The coaches meet on videotape and two years of red tape later, Coach Roscoe and nine Oakland players travel to Havana to play Coach Nicolas' team. For one week, the players and coaches eat, dance, swim, argue and play baseball together. But when the parent of an Oakland player is murdered back home, it brings back the inescapable reality and challenges of life in an American inner city.
In the middle of La Habana, three friends meet on the rooftop day after day to discuss their dreams and aspirations. Though they lack the proper resources, they decide to start their own business, a decision that pushes them towards maturity, although at an unforeseen cost.
The brash, opinionated owner of a nightclub manages to drive everybody crazy on a boat trip to Havana.
As the walls of Cuba's ageing infrastructure continue to crumble, a burgeoning street art scene is born in Havana. Murals of hand-painted masked character – Supermalo – with the tag “2+2=5?” have begun to appear in seemingly every corner of the heavily foot trafficked city.
Dawn breaks in La Habana, and as the day advances we follow the simple lives of ten ordinary Cubans, with only sounds and images accompanied by music.
Three juxtaposing stories taking place in Portugal, Austria and Cuba create an intimate and poetic portrait of the daily lives and struggles of the elderly in an unstable world, seen through the eyes of their grandchildren.
This film is considered one of Tin Tan's funniest comedies. This time, the charismatic comedian incarnates a mariachi musician that lives the most entertaining an extraordinary adventures while traveling from Mexico to the paradisaic island of Cuba. An example of the excellent cinematographic comedy that only Tin Tan can achieve.
After a violent storm, Ali awakens on a deserted beach, sick and disoriented. They'll be looking for him and he must keep moving. Ivan, a local Cuban, takes Ali to the apartment of his sister Manuela, a dancer in Havana. At first, she is apprehensive to take in this tormented stranger, but she relents as she feels drawn to this mysterious person who has shown up on her door step. Ali is haunted by nightmares, which bring him to the horror of the interrogation room at Guantanamo, and by startling visions linking his past and his present life. But are these nightmares flash backs to his experiences in the prison or just dreams of a tortured soul?
Hamburg, Germany, 1939. Getting a passage aboard the passenger liner St. Louis seems to be the last hope of salvation for more than nine hundred German Jews who, desperate to escape the atrocious persecution to which they are subjected by the Nazi regime, intend to emigrate to Cuba.
A patriot (René Lavan) with a rebellious brother falls in love with a dissident's daughter (Mayte Vilán) in Castro's Cuba.
China Valdes joins the Cuban underground after her brother is killed by the chief of the secret police, Ariete. She meets and falls in love with American expatriate Tony Fenner. Tony develops a plan to tunnel under the city's cemetery to a plot owned by a high official, assassinate him, and blow up the whole Cuban hierarchy at the ensuing state funeral. Together with a band of dedicated revolutionaries, they begin digging.