A ship scrapyard in western Cuba. The observing camera follows Raudel and his colleagues who work in what seems like a hermetically sealed microcosm. A homing pigeon strays into the place; the workers contemplate it silently as they smoke. Sometimes they talk about their dreams. Shots are focussed in turns on their bodies and their surroundings. Rhythmic, artfully crafted and authentically produced sounds accompany precise and lucid images, without aestheticizing the harshness of their work.

At the turn of 1961/62, Agnès Varda travelled to Cuba and saw a country that integrated Marx and Lenin into the everyday life of the Caribbean. Cha-cha-cha was part of it, but also cars à l’américaine. At her Parisian animation stand, Varda animated the black and white photos she had brought back home in an almost jaunty photo film. Chris Marker, her close friend from the Rive Gauche circle of the French Nouvelle Vague, had just paved the way for this cinematic form. They also shared an enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution – and finally even a bit of Leipzig festival experience: In 1964, Varda’s moving photo montage won the Silver Dove. Despite or because of the subtle irony with which she looks at this somewhat improvised socialism?

In September 1968, Fidel Castro comments on the suppression of the Prague Spring in surprisingly critical terms. He opens his thunderous speech with the statement that it could endanger Cuba’s safety. Although Santiago Álvarez was the guest of honour at the Leipzig festival, this newsreel report was withdrawn from the programme. After long research it will be shown for the first time in Leipzig in this Retrospective.

The beaches of Havana, splashing around, tender gestures between lovers, the sun glistening on the water, hips swaying to music. With this light-handed etude, Néstor Almendros delivers a shimmering testimony of post-revolutionary relaxation – and an early proof of his virtuosity as a cinematographer.
The film was made at ICAIC – and disappeared there, too. The national film art institute founded in 1959 by order of the new government saw no place for such neorealistic extravaganzas in the new Cuban cinema and issued a screening ban. Néstor Almendros left Cuba in 1961 to become a world-renowned cinematographer in the US and Europe. His name was expunged from the ICAIC filmography published in the book accompanying the 1974 Cuban retrospective in Leipzig.

When Hollywood star Errol Flynn appeared on the Leipzig festival screen in 1960, he had been dead for a year. The audience saw him in his last role: as an aged lover – of Havana, casinos and cocktails, as the nemesis of the Cuban liberation movement, which had declared war on corrupt bon vivants like him. The movie swashbuckler rhapsodises about his Cuban counterpart Fidel Castro and nonchalantly moderates the history of the dictatorship and liberation of the island state, cigarette holder in hand.
Did Hollywood call Leipzig to recommend this film? It was probably Moscow, because its world premiere is said to have taken place there in 1959. But how did the self-confessed anti-communist Errol Flynn come to make this declaration of love? Maybe his new friend Fidel did not tell him the whole truth?