Memories of Underdevelopment

97 minutes

Adapted by Cuban filmmaker Tomas Gutierrez Alea from Edmundo Desnoe's novel Inconsolable Memories, this 1969 film portrays the alienation of a bourgeois intellectual caught in the warp of a rapidly changing social reality. A thoroughly mature and original creation, Alea's film does not caricature Sergio—a 28-year-old living off reparations from his nationalized property—but rather strikingly portrays the existential contradictions of a man living in a vacuum, in a mixture of past and present, whose only response to the missile crisis is to watch it through binoculars while his more intellectually authentic (if less well schooled) countrymen respond with action. Told from Sergio's viewpoint, the film is a call to continued action for Cubans and an engrossing psychological portrait. By Don Druker