Rum & TuKola

Havana Film Festival New York schedule is up. I’m excited to see Dia de las Flores, though there are a few movies absent from this list… still waiting to see Seven Days in Havana.

03/26/13

My review of El Médico: The Cubatón Story, at The Rumpus. Check it out.

11/26/12

This new movie— about the clash of old-school Cuban values, new-school reggaeton culture, government jobs, the capitalist undertow of Cuba’s art industry, and more— looks super interesting, and it’s playing tonight (7pm) at NYC’s Chelsea Clearview cinema.

08/15/12

Cuban film

-> for getting get lost in. Cine Cuba Paradiso = an amazing trove of full-length, hard-to-find Cuban films.

06/21/12

"Waiting for Fidel," 1974 Canadian documentary, is available online, for free. Amazing.

05/30/12

"There are certain places in the world that conjure an almost universal sense of longing; places that seem to carry a palpable sense of themselves in the air..." The Rumpus review of animated-Havana film Chico & Rita

05/26/12

Life -> art, and all that. Going tomorrow to see this film at the TriBeCa fest, and excited, particularly given the kerfuffle that’s surrounded the two defecting stars of the film.

04/23/12

Fernando Pérez stepped down on March 11 as director of the Young Filmmaker’s Festival, which is happening this weekend in Havana. The decision was inspired, it seems, by government censorship of a documentary he thought should have been included in the lineup. ”On not being able to demonstrate in practice the inclusive coherence that I’ve demonstrated through the Festival, I’ve made the personal decision not to continue at its head,” he writes on the festival’s website. Spanish readers, go at it— really interesting thoughts on the state of Cuban cinema today.

It seems it was a documentary about this Alamar rapper that spurred the controversy.

04/6/12

An interview I did with the insightful, sharp, and kind filmmaker Fernando Pérez is up on Guernica. Check it out.

03/5/12

I’m pretty excited to see “Chico and Rita,” the animated film by director Fernando Trueba, artist Javier Mariscal and Tono Errando that’s been the big surprise of the Best Animated Feature category of the Oscars. Original music by Bebo Valdes and animated scenes of my favorite Havana haunts, like this, which is totally the Hotel Nacional? Yes please.

02/16/12