Filmmaking with Foreigners

Abstract

The profound crisis of the Special Period transformed the nature of filmmaking in Cuba. Cuban cinema could no longer be contained within the boundaries of the island nation nor sustained by the industrial model established in 1959. From 1991 onward, Cuban industrial cinema produced through the State’s Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográfica (ICAIC) regularly ventured into the international film market. The extreme scarcity of the period led to an increase in foreign coproductions, the emergence of an independent cinema reliant on digital technology, and an increase in production of both documentary and fiction films about Cuban culture from a vantage point located outside Cuba. An investigation of the resulting films and the conditions that surrounded their production reveals that the emotional geography of Cuba was moving beyond social revolution and toward the individual self. In addition, foreign coproductions, new digital technologies, and the production of foreign films in Cuba, led to new representations of the island and new cinematic genres for both Cuban and foreign consumption.

For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.

—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland