Chronicling the Revolution: Cuban Film

As with all revolutions since the invention of cinema, the Cuban Revolution was mesmerized by the political and social power of film. And like all revolutions, the early passion slowly but surely turned into a love-hate relationship. No one is a better representative of this curve than the country's best known director, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, who started out railing against bureaucracy in Death of a Bureaucrat, continued showing the inner conflicts of the middle class who embraced the revolution in Memories of Underdevelopment, and went all the way to examining the complexities of religion and sexuality in the 1990s in Strawberries and Chocolate. Unfortunately, we haven't seen all the movies in the best collection of Cuban film available at Amazon, The Cuban Masterworks Collection. Yet, it seems like a good first approach to the whole of Cuban cinema. And then there is the well-known Buena Vista Social Club which will tell you plenty about the country.