‘An authentic Cuban cinema came into existence with the Revolution of 1959 and the creation of the Cuban film institute, ICAIC, unleashing furious creative energy among a new generation of film-makers. While US hostility threw the island into the arms of the Soviet Union, the film-makers steered clear of the communist orthodoxy of socialist realism, and instead paid homage equally to Eisenstein and Fellini, the French New Wave and Brazilian Cinema Novo. A bevy of internationally renowned directors quickly emerged, including Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the documentarist Santiago Alvarez, and the always polemical Julio García Espinosa. There were political casualties, of course, but most of what has been claimed about censorship in Cuban cinema is exaggerated and itself politically motivated. In fact the Institute was a place of safety for nonconformists, and a second home for other Latin American film-makers escaping political repression. Its small but steady output in the 70s and 80s included, predictably, genre movies about revolutionary heroes, but also experimental films by black directors and a new genre, what might be called the critical social comedy. Films like the anarchic Plaff, lampooning the sacred cows of communist orthodoxy while upholding socialist values, met with huge popular success. The 90s threw the whole Cuban economy into crisis, when the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe left Cuba in desperate isolation, and the Institute turned its efforts to co-productions with mainly European commercial partners. Cuban film-makers have responded to the crisis with a shared existential tendency to re-imagine the divided nation in the face of an uncertain future. This is especially the case in the films of Fernando Pérez (Havana Suite), who, following Alea’s death in 1996 (after his powerful critique of homophobia in Strawberry and Chocolate), must now be considered Cuba’s foremost film-maker.’ Michael Chanan