Background
Bom on December 11,1928, in Havana, Cuba, Gutiérrez Alea grew up in a well-to-do family, embraced Marxism during his teenage years, and later became a supporter of Fidel Castro's revolution.
(Up to a Point (1984) exposes and challenges the concept o...)
Up to a Point (1984) exposes and challenges the concept of male superiority, or "machismo," and the sexual double standard that is very much a fact of life in contemporary Cuba.
http://www.newyorkerfilms.com/Up-to-a-Certain-Point-(1984)/1/382/
(Strawberry and Chocolate (1995), the first Cuban film to ...)
Strawberry and Chocolate (1995), the first Cuban film to go into general release in the United States and to be nominated for an Oscar, marked an important opening in Cuban social mores. Through the friendship between an idealist and naive Marxist student and the gay man who is out to seduce him, the film presents a humorous plot that highlights Cuba's repressive measures against homosexuals. In his own words, Gutiérrez Alca sought to represent an even more universal theme when he told the New York Times that in reality this was a film "about intolerance and incomprehension of those who are different, and that applies not only to homosexuals, but to everyone who is discriminated against".
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106966/
Bom on December 11,1928, in Havana, Cuba, Gutiérrez Alea grew up in a well-to-do family, embraced Marxism during his teenage years, and later became a supporter of Fidel Castro's revolution.
In the early 1950s he attended the Italian film school Centro Sperimentale de Cinematografia de Roma, where he was influenced by the wave of neorealism in European films, which depicted lower-class life in a stark, realistic manner.
In 1959, on the heels of the new cultural laws of revolutionary Cuba, Gutiérrez Alea co-founded (with Santiago Alvarez) the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematographic Industry (ICAIC). That same year he directed the documentary Esta Tierra Nuestra (This Land of Ours), an optimistic portrayal of the new government's agrarian reform initiative. The innovative years between 1966 and 1979 are considered the golden years of Cuban cinema. Much of the credit is given to Gutiérrez Alea's leadership in the area of film and his commitment to the Cuban revolution. His political commitment, however, did not deter him from criticizing and satirizing what he characterized as the incongruent and absurd realities of contemporary Cuba.
A number of his films received critical acclaim and awards during this period. In his 1966 film, Death of a Bureaucrat, a metaphor for the inflexibility of the revolution, Gutiérrez Alea examines and critiques the flaws of revolutionary Cuban society, mocking the political system that seems to pursue its citizens even after death. It received the Karlovy Vary Film Festival Special Jury Prize. Memories of Underdevelopment, filmed in 1968, firmly established his reputation as a filmmaker, and is regarded as his masterpiece.
The story deals with an intellectual trying to find his place in post-revolutionary Cuba and examines the ambivalences and the sense of alienation that accompanied the transitional period. Former Neiv York Times film critic Vincent Canby called it a superb film, "complete in the way that very few movies are". Although the film was awarded the U.S. National Society of Film Critics Rosenthal Award in 1973, Gutiérrez Alea was denied a visa to attend the ceremony. When the film eventually opened commercially in New York, the New York Times selected it as one of 1974's ten best movies. Among the other awards it received were the New York Film Festival Chaplin and the Karlovy Vary Film Festival FIPRESCI prizes.
Gutiérrez Alea died before he could complete Guaútanamera (1997), a humorous social comment on contemporary Cuba. Longtime collaborator Juan Carlos Tabio and Mirtha Tbarra, Gutiérrez Alea's widow and protagonist in many of his films, worked to complete this project. Based on a story that had appeared in the news, and interspersed with observations and verbatim dialogue heard on Havana streets, this film takes Gutierrez Alea s satire on the Cuban bureauciacy and its crumbling infrastructure to new heights. An old aunt of one of the protagonists, while visiting her hometown after many years, becomes romantically aroused and dies during a tryst with the lover of her youth. The film centers on the efforts to transfer her remains from one end of Cuba to another in the face of gasoline shortages and bureaucratic mix-ups. It is interesting to note that his final work combined the themes of love and death.
(Strawberry and Chocolate (1995), the first Cuban film to ...)
(Up to a Point (1984) exposes and challenges the concept o...)
(Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Julio García Espinosa. ...)
His films aim to represent incidents and problems from the everyday lives of ordinary Cubans, often with sentimental and humorous undertones. Many of the story lines in his films were taken directly from the pages of Granma, the official government newspaper, known for its strict adherence to the Cuban Communist Party line.
Quotes from others about the person
The exile Cuban community, particularly in the United States, criticized him for not being harsher in his depiction of hardship in Castro's Cuba. The international community, however, seems to admire this filmmaker's work and agrees with the National Society of Critics 1974 citation quoted in his obituary, praising his work as a "very personal and very courageous confrontation of the artist's doubts and ambivalences regarding the Cuban Revolution".