• Submitted by: manso
• Arts and Culture
• 12 / 06 / 2010

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By MICHAEL CIEPLY. December 5, 2010, 11:11 pm. “No route found.” So said a voice on the fuzzy line as it searched for a telecommunications path during the first 15 or 20 attempts to reach the Hotel Nacional de Cuba on Friday evening. But the connections finally clicked for a quick conversation with the film industry’s man in Havana — one of them, anyway — Sidney Ganis.Sidney GanisKevin Winter/Getty Images Sidney Ganis

“This is a fascinating place,” said Mr. Ganis, who was part of a delegation sent by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to show Hollywood films at the 32nd International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, and to talk with Cuban moviemakers.

As Mr. Ganis spoke, the director Kathryn Bigelow and the writer Mark Boal were introducing “The Hurt Locker,” winner of the Best Picture Oscar for 2009, to a Cuban audience. “The Kite Runner,” “Coraline” and “Akeelah and the Bee” were also on tap, from a Hollywood group that included Bill Mechanic, Carol Mechanic, Nancy Ganis, Rebecca Yeldham and David Ansen.

Exactly how Cubans normally see American films, which fall under the longstanding trade embargo, Mr. Ganis said he didn’t know. But see them they do. “I would guess it’s by way of DVDs, official or otherwise,” he said.

Junkets across various political and cultural divides have become a regular feature of an academy program that has sponsored past trips to Iran, China and Vietnam. The aim is to build better movies both here and abroad. The Vietnam trip, for instance, led to further sessions in which experts recruited by the academy helped retool that country’s approach to film sound.

On Friday, Mr. Ganis was prepping for dinner with some film people and others at a paladar — a tiny restaurant, serving 12 or fewer people by law, in a Cuban home.

The table talk, he said, would probably be familiar. “It seems like the problems are the same all over the world,” Mr. Ganis said. “Producers like myself are hunting for money to make movies.”

Source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/hollywood-goes-to-havana/