FILMS
The dates are below and the times are at 6:30 and they are being held in PMH 401.
2/7/12 - The Price of Sugar (2007)ad feedback
On the Caribbean island of the Dominican Republic, tourists flock to pristine beaches, with little knowledge that a few miles away thousands of dispossessed Haitians are under armed guard on plantations harvesting sugarcane, most ofwhich ends up in US kitchens. Cutting cane by machete, they work 14 hour days, 7 days a week, frequently without access to decent housing, electricity, clean water, education, healthcare or adequate nutrition. The Price of Sugar follows a charismatic Spanish priest, Father Christopher Hartley, as he organizes some of this hemisphere's poorest people, challenging the powerful interests profiting from their work. This film raises key questions about where the products we consume originate, at what human cost they are produced and ultimately, where our responsibility lies.
-Written by Louise Rosen Ltd.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
3/20/12 Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968)
Sergio, a wealthy bourgeois aspiring writer, decides to stay in Cuba even though his wife and friends flee to Miami. Sergio looks back over the changes in Cuba, from the Cuban Revolution to the missile crisis, the effect of living in an underdeveloped country, and his relations with his girlfriends Elena and Hanna. Memories of Underdevelopment is a complex character study of alienation during the turmoil of social changes. The film is told in a highly subjective point of view through a fragmented narrative that resembles the way memories function.
-IMDb database
--------------------------------------------------------------------
4/10/12 Fresa y chocolate (1994)
Diego, a cultivated, apolitical, skeptical young artist living in Havana initiates a friendship with fiercely communist homophobe David with the intention of seducing him. David, knowing this, allows the relationship to build so he can spy on a person he sees as aberrant and dangerous to the communist cause. Despite their conflicting sexualities andpolitical ideologies the two slowly build a relationship out of their differences, proving that camaraderie and friendship can overcome the most divisive superficialities. The movie is based on the short story El Lobo, el bosque y el hombre nuevo written by Senel Paz in 1990.
-IMDb database
--------------------------------------------------------------------
4/17/12 Suite Habana (2003)
Suite Habana is a 2003Cuban documentary directed by Fernando Pérez. The documentary depicts a day in a life of thirteen real people, from a ten-year-old child with Down Syndrome to a 79-year-old lady who sells peanuts in the street. The film has no dialogue, using sound and image to evoke emotional effect. Several stories are juxtaposed to convey the plot points.
-IMDb database
--------------------------------------------------------------------
4/23/12 La edad de la peseta (2006)
La edad de la peseta (a common Cuban phrase that refers to the period right before adolescence) is a quirky, surprising, coming-of-agefilm. Set in 1958 in Havana, the year that culminates the Revolution, ten-year-old Samuel has just arrived in town with his recently divorced mother. They take up residence in the house of his eccentric grandmother Violeta, and Samuel is introduced to a new, mysterious world where Samuel finds himself an adult in comparison to his child-like mother.
-Hollywood Theater
