Documentary. The Miraflores neighbourhood, built in 1962 by the same people who would inhabit it, is the result of the first efforts of the Revolution to eradicate marginal neighbourhoods. Yolanda, a new teacher in the community, faces the differences and conflicts that arise in her love affair with Mario, a worker from the neighbourhood, in which the clash between old mentality and new attitudes is manifested.

While studying high school, Sara studied music for six years at the "Amadeo Roldán" Municipal Conservatory of Havana. She practiced journalism in the student newspaper Mella and in the weekly Hoy, Domingo. She spent a few months in New York City and studied at ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry). She made three small documentaries for the Popular Encyclopedia directed by the filmmaker Octavio Cortázar (1935-2008). Later on, she was assistant director to the Belgian filmmaker Agnès Varda in the documentary ‘Salut les cubains!’, and also to Tomás Gutiérrez Alea in ‘Cumbite’’ and to Jorge Fraga in ‘El robo’, from 1965.

She began her career directing documentaries on popular culture and traditions, marginal populations, racism, feminism, and the social inclusion of women.

In early 1974 she was promoted to director of fiction films at the ICAIC, and she began her debut feature, ´De cierta Manera’. During the shooting, on June 2, 1974, she died - at the young age of 31 - due to respiratory arrest caused by one of her frequent asthma attacks, and the film had to be finished by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Julio García Espinosa.

The screening will be preceded by the talk "Filmar con la piel: género, raza y márgenes en el cine de Sara Gómez" by María Luisa Ortega, researcher and lecturer in Audiovisual Communication at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

De cierta manera was Sara Gómez's first and last feature film, a film that strains the boundaries between documentary and fiction to explore individual contradictions and shadow zones, such as machismo, in revolutionary Cuba. It is also the result of an extraordinary documentary career - with titles such as Iré a Santiago (1964), Guanabacoa: Crónica de mi familia (1966) and En la otra isla (1968) - in which he deployed innovative resources to explore identity and the margins of the social and the cinematographic. As Tomás Gutiérrez-Alea said, "Sara would have liked to have made films without cameras, without microphones". This presentation aims to offer certain keys to this ethical and aesthetic position of her cinema.

Latin American Directors. Gender roles. Construction of identities

Year of Production: 1977

Running Time: 78’

Country: Cuba

Language: Spanish

Director: Sara Gómez

Cast: Mario Balmaseda, Yolanda Cuéllar, Mario Limonta, Isaura Mendoza, Bobby Carcases and Sarita Reyes

Production Companies: ICAIC

Main Festivals and Awards: Mention at the Annual Selection of the Critics of Havana as "one of the ten most significant films of the year".