Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Película de director cubano en Sundance Festival.



El talentoso director cubano Miguel Coyula Presenta su película Memorias del desarrollo en el marco de Sundance Film Festival (New frontier, fuera de competencia). La historia está basada en la novela homónima de Edmundo Desnoes. Memorias del desarrollo continúa con la historia de Sergio fuera de Cuba, el personaje central de Memorias del subdesarrollo dirigida por Tomás Gutiérrez Alea en el año 1968. A continuación una reseña de la importante revista The Hollywood Report.

Memories of Overdevelopment
Film Reviews (Sundance Reviews).

By James Greenberg,
January 25, 2010.
Memories of Overdevelopment

Bottom Line: Personal take on long-term effects of the Cuban revolution is a film bursting with ideas, but more experimental than commercial.

PARK CITY -- If, as this year's "rebel" motto suggests, Sundance is attempting to get back to its roots with innovative, truly independent filmmaking, than "Memories of Overdevelopment" is a good start. Miguel Coyula's rambling, highly personal distillation of the Cuban revolution and its effects on a disillusioned intellectual is thoughtful and cinematically bold, but its complex structure and subject matter will limit it to the festival circuit.

Taking off where the landmark Cuban film "Memories of Underdevelopment" left off, and based on a novel by the same author, Coyula traces the life of Sergio (Ron Blair), a true believer in the socialist revolution which ultimately didn't turn as he had hoped. Now relocated in New York, Sergio lectures at colleges about what went wrong in Cuba while womanizing and darkly ruminating about the failures of his life.

He's a morose character who barely smiles through the whole film, but it is the way this 20th-century tale of alienation is told that holds your interest and makes it powerful. Put together in a non-linear style, with flashbacks and a collage of images from Sergio's past, the film pieces together an array of personal and historical events to create a portrait of a lost soul. As Sergio says at one point, what's going on in his head may be more real than the real world, and the film captures his disconnectedness from life well.

It's not an easy story to tell and the film travels to Paris, London, Cuba and New York to get inside the character as he tries to rekindle the intensity of his revolutionary years. Blair's low-key but charismatic performance makes an essentially tragic figure somewhat sympathetic.

Coyula also wrote the screenplay and shot the film but in his additional role as editor he could have trimmed from the 115-minutes running time. But overall, it's an affecting portrait of a modern man becoming more and more isolated from the world he helped create.



Un intelectual deja la revolución cubana y el "subdesarrollo", sólo para encontrarse en desacuerdo con las ambigüedades de su nueva vida en el mundo "desarrollado". Un retrato de un marginado sin posición política clara o ideología. Un extraño en una tierra extraña que lucha con la vejez, el deseo sexual, y la imposibilidad de la persona a pertenecer, a cualquier sociedad.

Nota
escrita por Suzana Dejkanovic. (traducida del inglés)


Director: Miguel Coyula
Writer: Coyula
Producer: David Leitner
Executive producers: Steven Pieczenik, Suzana Dejkanovic
Associate producer: Juan Martínez
Director of Photography: Miguel Coyula
Music: Dika Durbuzovic, Miguel Coyula, Hayes Greenfield, Luis Novo
Editor: Miguel Coyula

cast
Ron Blair, Eileen Alana, Susan Perez, Lester Martinez, Dayana M. Hernandez, Reb Fleming, Alain Jiménez, Mariko Matsuyoshi, Chi Young Park, Angela García, Steve Roberts, Rachida Naceur, Adam Plocth, Jeff Pucillo, David W Leitner, Milan Coyula, Paul De Sousa, Jorge Molina, Marta Reiman, Wanda O'connell, Michael Pearlstein-Gluck, Anais Borck, Nana Masuda, Jean Marie Offenbacher, Stephanie Cooper, Adam Benn, Kathia Rodríguez, Jorge Alí, Claudia Barrientos, Yukiko Niigata, Jean-Baptiste Lequime, Felix Thompson, Dorota Dejkanovic, Dayana M. Hernández, Mario Coyula, Mariana Coyula... Cast IMDB.

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