Cuba
Airplane Cuba
20/03/08 12:13
Cuba’s
international film school, the EICTV, reminds me of
Passport to Pimlico. Set up in 1986, it isn’t
actually Cuban, but belongs to the Foundation for
New Latin American Cinema (President: Gabriel
García Marquez), whose friend Fidel declared it to
be ‘not national territory’. If you arrive by the
front gates, you have to pass a guard house, but
they don’t seem very vigilant, and anyway there’s a
back road which isn’t controlled. I’ve been going
there every two years or so since the mid-90s to do
workshops, much as other people from Britain and in
fact all over (although I first went to Cuba in
1979 to write a book on Cuban cinema, and then
filmed there on several occasions in the 80s for
Channel Four). There’s a permanent staff, but also
lots of visitors. On this visit there were
workshops being given by film-makers from Chile,
Peru, Argentina, Germany and Spain, and the foyer
has graffiti scrawled on the walls by Francis Ford
Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Costa Gavras, Ettore
Scola and Stephen Friers among others.
Distinguished company indeed! Read
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