PRIZE AWARD AND SCREENING
Friday October 15, 6:00 p.m., Frank Collymore Hall

This year our Prize Award for significant contribution to Caribbean Cinema goes to the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC).  Mirta Ibarra will receive the award. 

The Screening: 

Guantanamera 

(Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Juan Carlos Tabío, Cuba/Spain/Germany, 1995. 
Satirical comedy. Spanish with English subtitles. 104 mins)

When Aunt Yoyita dies during a visit to Gina (Mirta Ibarra) in Guantánamo, Gina, along with Yoyita's childhood sweetheart, the ageing Cándido, must take the body to Havana. To their annoyance, Gina's overbearing husband Adolfo, a punctilious undertaker with political ambitions, takes charge of the journey. On the road, they keep crossing paths with Mariano, a playboy trucker with a woman at every way- station. He and Gina recognize each other: he was her student and wrote her love letters, then dropped out of school in embarrassment. Before they reach Havana, Gina realizes she can choose between Adolfo and Mariano: does Aunt Yoyita's life help Gina decide…?

“The last film by Cuba's sly satirist Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is a road comedy involving a pig-headed bureaucrat with a mad scheme for transporting corpses - and his sensuous wife, who reunites with one of her former students, now a womanizing truck driver. While romance ebbs and flows, Alea fills the rest of his frame with a portrait of today's Cuba, which may languish under a bankrupt and dour political system, but is after all a Caribbean island -- filled with life, color and invention”. Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times.

The Film will be presented by Actress Mirta Ibarra (Gina in Guantanamera)

Mirta Ibarra began her acting career in 1967, having graduated from the National Art School of Cuba and from the University of Havana, where she completed a degree in Latin American Literature. A prolific theatre actress, she won critical and popular acclaim for her performances in works such as Weekend in Bahía and Comrade Mauser Has the Floor. Her television work includes a number of major roles in soap operas, whilst her cinema work has seen her appear in many films both in Cuba and abroad. She won the Havana Film Festival Best Actress award for Up to a Certain Point in 1983 and Best Supporting Actress in two Festivals, Havana and Gramado, for Strawberry and Chocolate in 1994. In 2001-2002 she toured Spain with her play Havana Obsession, in which she also played the lead. Her latest film, the Spanish-Cuban co-production So Far Away, opened last year.

Want to learn to be a Filmmaker?  

Estrella Hendrickson Lorenzo of the International School of Film and Television, Cuba is the presenter in a Free Film Students' Forum to be held on Friday, October 15 from 9.30a.m. to 12.00p.m. at the Barbados Community College.  All welcome.

Estrella Hendrickson Lorenzo is a graduate in Cybernetics and Mathematics of the University of Havana, Cuba. She has completed two workshops on editing with AVID and a post-graduate qualification in Multimedia Design at the School of Sound and Vision, Madrid, Spain. Between 1971 and 1986 she worked in the Computer Section of the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) as a programmer, a systems analyst and, finally, as Head of the Analysis and Programming Department. Since 1987 she has been a Computer Specialist at the International Film and Television School (EICTV) at San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, where she is Head of the Computer Section.

In 1994 she produced and animated the EICTV short Las formas en libertad (Free Form), directed by Rosa Sophia Rodríguez. She later helped to develop the five-episode series Fifteen Years of the EICTV, which was originally her own idea. Her printed editing work includes EICTV editions of titles by Gabriel García Márquez and by the current Director of the School, the filmmaker Julio García Espinosa.

She has assisted in organizing both Belize Film Festivals to date (2003 and 2004) and, most recently, edited the DVD Pablo Milanés Live using footage from a concert by the Cuban artist in the Dominican Republic.

Though Cuban through and through, Estrella is of Anglophone Caribbean descent and vividly recalls from her childhood weekend cricket matches in Cuba, often umpired by her father and sometimes involving teams flown in from Anglophone territories…