Sara Gómez Retrospective

From 29th May to 6th June

Organitzada junto a la Filmoteca de Catalunya

Sara would have liked to make films without cameras, without microphones: directly.
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

Sara Gómez made two dozen short films and one feature film, making her one of the first women to direct films in revolutionary Cuba. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of her death and thanks to the restoration and digitalisation of her films, carried out by the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), in collaboration with Vulnerable Media Lab of Canada and Arsenal-Institute for Film and Video Art of Berlin, the MIFDB returns to the work of this pioneering filmmaker, considered to be the first in the field of fiction in her country, with a retrospective organised together with the Filmoteca de Catalunya.

In this almost complete retrospective, we will see a body of work in which the qualities of an “imperfect cinema” are intuitively crystallised. A popular cinema that reflects a commitment to liberation and social justice movements, a cinema that shows a deep interest in Afro-Cuban culture and its roots on the island. Sara Gómez’s films – or Sarita, as she signed her entire life – stretch the boundaries between documentary and fiction to focus on individual and social contradictions, on the zones of light and shadow in revolutionary Cuba.

From her first film, Plaza Vieja (1962), to her last, De cierta Manera (1974), the motto that has governed her cinema can be summed up in the phrase she uttered in Mi aporte (1972): “I renounce the feeling of impotence”. The filmmaker’s entire oeuvre shows that she was consistent with this determination, and that she also achieved her explicit aim in this documentary: to make her films an aesthetically transformative contribution to contemporary society.

Full program here.

Filmoteca de Catalunya
Plaça de Salvador Seguí, 1-9. Barcelona
Metro L2, L3 Buses 21 / 59 / 88 / 91 / D20 / D50 / H14 / V11 / V13