First steps. Entrance to ICAIC
A generation of documentalists
I also became a teacher
Four Cuban Films
Two Fetish Actresses

Born in the village of Guanabacoa, like other main personalities from Cuban culture, Ernesto Lecuona, Rita Montaner, Ignacio Villa, Bola de Nieve- , this movie director; also writer although he doesn't admitt it (possessing a Casa de las Americas Prize with his book Corresponsal de Guerra, dealing with the Sandinist struggle in Nicaragua); is in addittion, an Scorpion son because he was born under this sign, November 19, 1944, being, like all native of this scorpion symbol -for astrologers it is the snake or the eagle- marked by mysteries or enigmas transformed in the outcomes of his artistic creation, holding singular creative breath. But, he is, and it is fair to state it before going on writing these lines, a good man, having an intense painful humanity, never far from anybody, a human being full of tenderness and extreme sensitivity, mildness at relationships and genuine strength allowing us to get closer to him, not only due to a long and close friendship since many years ago, sharing the same Scorpion telluric encouragement, but also for the respect his talent and work deserve, which are for me, within Cuban cinematography only comparable to those coming from the greats.

The author of so trascendent films for our culture, such as Madagascar, Clandestinos and La vida es silbar, without disdain the innocence and candor aura from Hello, Hemingway, can get inside constellations, to settle besides Antares, owner of the most profound poetic metaphors in the celluloid by a Cuban filmmaker around 90s becuase, for me, and I confess it from my passion (all those who know me, are witness of my firm sincerity), Fernando is the movie director touching with more deepness and beauty, the existencial sorrows that are shaking the Cuban contemporary society, at the end of the century and millennium and the individual features conforming our people, through lights and shadows, in a hugely controversial universe more tasteful in this way for art.


First Steps. Entrance to ICAIC.

Related to Cuabn Institute of Cinematographic art and Industry (ICAIC) since he was eighteen, he started to work as director assistant on 1962 and as Russian translator, doing the same thing at Superior Pedagogical Institute '' Makarenko''. There were no movie schools then, and it was necessary to improve his educational level, that's why, he entered to Art and Letters School at Havana University, where he got his Master Degree in Hispanic Language and Literature working also as Philosophy teacher.

Cuabn movie pages had his articles where the seventh art leaded his porse and reflections, essential theoretic allotment also for further execution as images creator. "When I remember Mirta Aguirre talking about thought through images, That's what happened to me. I always have thoughts by images. Tha's related to my passion for movie... I'm always thinking through images. While walking I'm watching movie angles, although movie is not only image...''(1). I remember these words from him as the corpus of an interview, some years ago, when he gained his last Coral Prize (not the last one as he is still living, creating) for La vida es silbar.


In this way, and together with a genious like Titón (Tomás Gutierrez Alea), he dressed himself to be a production assistant in Una pelea cubana contra los demonios. He did the same work afterwards with Manuel Octavio Gómez, in Ustedes tienen la palabra, partially worked in El otro Francisco until his freind and colleage Orlando Rojas substituted in this work and with Manuel Herrera in Girón.

A Generation of Documentalists

But Fernando, like the 99.9 percent of Cuban movie directors had a dream of full-length fiction movie. But, his generation, (also belonging to Daniel Díaz Torres and Rolando Díaz) had firstly to pass through documental school and Latin American ICAIC News Program, under the Santiago Alvarez's aegis. It was an epoch when, to approach science fiction was like repeating Alá's story... before that, it was necessary to gain the mountain showing strength, tenacity, persistence and value to produce, afterwards, the tribulations of fiction.
Having as guarantee, more than 50 editions for news programs, sorrily-extinct space from ICAIC production along the last decade, in detriment of our public and culture, Fernando Pérez grew up and gained work strength: ''Firstly, it showed me to quickly answer to reality with a cinematographic thought. Documental demands sharpness. To find a solution in the same moment, without previous plans. The News Programs and the documental exercising got me ready to give a quickly answer, this cinematographic viewpoint, creating in this way, the profession although each film is different and the profession can't be repetitive or become routine''. (2)

Perhaps, that experience has signed with particular strength, from its reality, the two first fiction films made by Fernando Pérez : Clandestinos and Hello, Hemingway (1990), where we can yet find that sort of improvisation disarray with which documental is facing reality.

Crónica de la Victoria, Puerto Rico and Cascos Blancos on 1975 was a kind of training for him, but in Cabinda (1977), Fernando experienced a qualitative change at his looking. ''Angola was the first feeling of own work, the former creation was only knowledge'', he confessed me some years ago, while we were drinking coffee at his apartment, located at the famous corner of Infanta and Manglar.

In 1978 brought Siembro viento en mi ciudad and Sábado Rojo and afterwards, two materials holding huge interested fro his life and work, in 1980: 4000 niños and Monimbó es Nicaragua, particularly becuase the Centro American struggle would feed his writing for the above mentioned testimony awarded with Casa de las Americas Prize on 1982. This last year, he would film Camilo.

And on 1983, one of his best documentals, saw the light: Omara, where ''I started to create fiction elements, I made re-buildings'', he considers it as an introduction to the cinematographic fables world, this piece gave us by itself, the Fernando Pérez's aesthetic projection, running with quiddity and cleverness through the Cuban popular music field recreating Omara Portuondo's mystic.

I also became a teacher

I just want to break the logical sequence of this man's living and doing.
I want to enter with him the Movie and TV International School in San Antonio de los Baños, where he worked as professor and head of production staff, developing there, workshops of documentals and production, being also docent director during the period of Brazilian Orlando Senna, labor he assumed, simply because ''I like teaching'' and more, as he states from the coherence of his image, ''It's an open and creative stage which means more than an academic ground''.

It would precisely be in the called-by-himself ''School of three worlds'' where ''the idea of Madagascar came up and I started to work with Manolito Rodríguez'', because Fernando always participates in the scripts of his movies elaboration.

After this movie filming and projection -a classic from Cuban cinema and the most solid and moving film, which certainly reviewed the 90s in the island-, The Cuban filmmaker went to Chile to make an eight-chapters serial for TV and aslo: 45-minutes docu-dramas, each one devoted to Parapsicology theme. There, the idea of La vida es silbar was born working with Humberto Jiménez.


Another break in these ''hard years'' but for Fernando, his six-months scholarship in Germany was equally satisfying and creative, experiencing intense events and reflections which would revert on his filmic project, because art is not only taken from life but also from culture.

Four Cuban Films

A forty-aged man (43 years exactly) made his bow at the fiction field with his first full-length movie. It could be a bloomer, a fruitless attempt, a haggard dream... a failure, but it wasn't. Because his prima opera came up from its phantoms, winning the Coral in this category at Havana Film Festival on 1988. It was Clandestinos, a work holding a unique language and youthful breath which, once again, showed that there aren't neither a priori plans, nor classifications or ages for the real talent. The epic of the cuban revolution in its struggle against Batistian tyranny, the leyend of that heroic girl, captured the spectators's attention to shake the country, translating, from its hugely emotive essence, the historical drama, with a load, certainly marked by a strong dosage of realism. As Fernando's presentation card at fiction movie, he had the sure hand to tell a fable, his correct casting handling and his poetic intensity.

Later on, at the Havana Film Festival of 1990, Hello, Hemingway gained a controversial Coral Prize. Fernando Pérez is one of those artists who holds a strong security at his performances, as he knows how to respect opossed opinions, without diminishing or hurting his self-steem, being a coherent man according to his principles, he manages to assimilate the adverse critic , through the sometimes-excesive melodramatic emphasis in this film, entwined yet to the previous film but having that human naivety we always perceive at his work. But 1994, holding his 50 years old in full artistic and intellectual maturity, opened for this filmmaker to produce his up- to -the-moment major work, taken to the lens by master Raúl Pérez Ureta.

Penalities, suspense, chaos and crisis substance rebond over the screen in Laura's speech, that, certainly, it's not a metaphysic entelechy although it is a pathetic metaphor where absurd events and, sometimes, the even cruelty , are conjugated with the most personal and sensible reflections and experiences of the artist, sincerely close to his people and able to translate, aesthetically, thanks to cinema language, from his images, one of the most complex and hard but luminary periods of Cuban history.

All of this is incorporated and alive on the secuences of his anthology Madagascar, a middle-lenght fiction movie (53 minutes) which, for me, when time quite the tormentous waters, will find the right value, more trascendent than all Fresas y Chocolates of that epoch, although less recognized, up to these moments, that those flavors of ''Coppelia''. In the final stage of this creative process and with other film, ''La vida es silbar'', he gained again the Coral Prize becoming the polemic center of the 1998 Havana Film Festival (a decade later from Clandestinos), to arise afterwards with the Goya Prize, in Spain.

This film, for the producer, as he told me in a personal meeting, ''is opened in the sense of individual liberty, because happiness is not the same for everybody and the necessity of chosing is permanent in life''.

Holding a language full of images, signed by the metaphoric body and his already virtual personal poetic, Fernando Pérez offered to the public and the island culture a reflection about our destinies, ''where we can live with pain towards hapiness''.

Julia, Mariana, Elpidio... from the double moral until marginality, ascend to translate the existencial corpus of a film maker who is and will always be, an honest cuban. Here is ending also, as he said, an evolutive processand although I make mataphoric cinema, it's not a movie of abstraction''. (3)

Each film, each theme is a new challenge and even, is imposing its own language because Fernando also likes to point, that although he makes a reflexive movie, is a movie that is always telling a story.

Now and for the first time, he assumes the challenge of filming outside the country a fiction movie: Amorosa Gilda, inspired on the novel Una sonrisa sin fin, from the Italian writer Anna Assenza who he met when at Havana Film Festival was exhibited La vida es silbar. With Raúl Pérez Ureta at the photographic direction, who accompanied him since Madagascar, Fernando will film in Sicily, the autobiographic history of a woman , victim of Polio who, since she was five and until the twenty five years will perform her struggle not only for surviving, but also to lead herself in favor of human being existence, overcoming the daily life vicissitudes.

Humanist by essence, Fernando Pérez assumes this history, with Italian actors and the financial support of Spain, France and Italy after receiving in Rome the Ennio Flaiano Prize, taking the name of Federico Fellini's script writer conferred to outstanding personalities as recognition of their work.

With the accent of Hello, Hemingway, as the director told me, with the same personal language in its images, he is thinking in narrating this story of feminist type, where the woman inspired him and inspired herself to translate hopes and fustrations, as apelative to feelings.

Some years ago, Fernando stated that the cinematographic works, he admire the most are Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock, Bonnie and Clyde by Arthur Penn, Novecento de Bertolucci, Cenizas y Diamantes and La tierra prometida from Polish Andrzej Wadja, plus the work of three masters, founders of the new Cuban cinematography: Santiago Álvarez, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Humberto Solás.

Without imitative solutions, Fernando could make his movie with the subjective attitude of his heart, with his anguishly critic glance and with the pasion, amen of ther intrinsic tenderness and strength of an scorpion, in the middle of searching and experiments demonstarting his natural and autehntic creative dissatisfaction.

Two Fetish Actresses

Nevetheless, it could not be fair to conclude this statement about Fernando if we don't talk about two fetish actresses who appear and disappeared in his films: Isabel Santos and Laura de la Uz. Having a particular expressive capability, both have moved through the celluloid, TV and theater to give thousand faces and epoch of the Cuban woman, since the most recent past until our days.

Why this repetion from the director, could be an interesting question, why he priviledged this presences in his cinema, Isabel in Clandestinos, as protagonist that gained a Coral Prize and in an opposed character from Elpidio short story in La vida es silbar and Laura as protagonist in Hello, Hemingway, who also gave a Coral for her performance and then in her best work in Cuba, her central-problem role in Madagascar where she also deserved the Prize. ''I can't say I lead Isabel's performance... because, when I face her, she is a strength... She has an automatic detector inside, she feels her character, always know waht to do... what I am always looking is seein her performing. She is a great actress, as the best of any country, any epoch''. And this viewpoint, unpublished until today, is delivered by Fernando with a singular brightness iin his pupils rebvealing his own emotions to validate his authoral selection.

And Laura?, I asked. He smiled and show also an infinite dosage of tenderness and respect for this young interpreter who has matured under his direction and has grown during her performances in his films.

''When i met her She had only nighteen years, and that was a problem, because, I saw her as a teenager and she wanted to make older characters. She is also a brilliant actress, but with her, i feel i have the possibility of lead her. we are so proundly identified that we have only to talk to achieve the mood of the character we are building. She is a very creative actress, supporting her performances with her feelings.

''You can trust both. They are capable of feeling, knowing whether they are right or wrong''.

We hope Fernando Alvarez would find financial support to translate to the images language those projects full of love , in the Havana of XXI century and about a popular character that is already a leyend, Andarín Carvajal, because this artists, this name not only have intense and penetrating looking, a critic retine, but also that special humor sense, very incisive due to his subtle irony always resent at his films, permeated of Cubanness.

Notes:
1. 2 and 3 are quotations taken from my work Filmar... silber a la manera de Fernando Pérez, published at Prisma Magazine, issue of year 26 no. 294, pp. 32-33 1999, July-August, 1999.
The other quotations are a large unpublished interview the author made for her book in production about life and work of this Cuban producer.

*Poet, narrator, essayist, critic nad journalist. doctor in historical sciences and Bachelor in Hispanic Language and Literature. Her work having a reknown prestigy has gained multiple and remarkable prizes.

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