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• Arts and Culture
• Cinema
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• 12 / 14 / 2006

By Reed Johnson

If you've ever sat in a packed Havana movie house waiting for the lights to dim, you know there are few pleasures Cubans savor more than a good film, unless it's a stout Cohiba cigar.

Fidel Castro's health is ailing and a cloudy future looms over the socialist island nation. But through Dec. 15, many Cubans will take time out from their daily preoccupations to soak up the offerings of the 28th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, one of the oldest and best-run such events in the Spanish-speaking part of the hemisphere.

The 11-day festival opened Tuesday with a screening of "El Laberinto del Fauno" ("Pan's Labyrinth") at the Karl Marx Theater. Actor Ralph Fiennes, resplendent in a Panama hat, and Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian Nobel Prize-winning author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude," and a longtime close friend of Castro, were among the opening-night attendees.

"Pan's Labyrinth" was a choice likely to appeal to art-house connoisseurs as well as custodians of Cuba's official state ideology. The much-acclaimed feature by Mexican writer-director Guillermo del Toro deals with a young girl who uses her imagination to confront the terrors of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. The movie's sympathies clearly lie with the left-wing Republican guerrillas battling Franco's right-wing fascist army.

Yet, over the years, Cuba's festival has built its reputation on artistic quality, not politics. It has been a place for ordinary Cubans as well as foreign visitors to see what's going on in the hearts and heads of screen artists from North America, the Caribbean, Central and South America, a region that is now producing some of the world's most intriguing cinema.

Most of the movies shown in the festival are independent productions, painfully low budget by Hollywood standards. But occasionally a major Hollywood flick will blow into town with the trade winds, as happened five years ago when Kevin Costner visited for a screening of the Roger Donaldson-directed Cuban missile crisis movie, "Thirteen Days."

And, after all, who really needs Hollywood, with its red-carpet premieres and mobs of shrieking press hounds? Most Cubans arrive at their festival on foot or, occasionally, in one of the old, vintage cars that cruise the streets of Havana. Perhaps, in some ways, it's a reminder of cinema's earliest days, when the new art form was seen as a way of bringing cheap, egalitarian entertainment to the masses.

Source: Los Angeles Times