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• 10 / 20 / 2007

Promoted by the Swedish Patrik Axen, a graduate from the International Cinema and Television School (EICTV) in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, the workshop is held through a joint effort by the EICTV, Stavro Filmproduktion, the Cuban Institute of Film Art and Industry (ICAIC) through its Santiago Alvarez Office, and the Huron Azul Center for the Development of Documentary Cinema from the Cuban Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC).

Eight filmmakers from Sweden and the same number from Cuba (directors, producers and photography directors) attend its theoretical sessions at the Glauber Rocha Hall in the FNCL, exchange experiences on documentary production in their countries and examine potential sources of financing and promotion of this audiovisual genre.

Jorge Luis Sanchez, a filmmaker with a large experience in documentary research in Cuban cinema and who has recently been awarded several times for his first feature, El Beny, on one of the most exceptional figures in Cuban music, is among the most outstanding participants.

Lily Suárez, an EICTV graduate in Photography Direction, is another of the filmmakers invited to the workshop. She started her career in experimental and feature films and has developed a large anthropological documentary production as part of her work at the Martin Luther King Memorial Center. Ms. Suárez has been awarded in national and international festivals and today forms part of the EICTV Photography Chair.

The participation of an outstanding filmmaker and fervent researcher of Cuban and international documentary cinema, Octavio Cortázar, the director of Por primera vez (For the first time,1967) a documentary film on the arrival of cinema to the Cuban mountains, does honor to this workshop. Mr. Cortazar heads the Center for the Development of Documentary Cinema in UNEAC and directs the TV program Pantalla Documental.

Erik Gandini, who recently released the controversial documentary film Gitmo, The New Rules of War, on the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba, the Swedish-Spanish journalist and documentalist Marcos Hellgren, who works for the Swedish State Television and is a documentary editor, are two of the Swedish filmmakers enrolled in the workshop. Mr. Hellgren won the topmost award in Swedish journalism with his TV series CP Magasinet.

Gandinis documentary Sacrifice, awarded at the 23rd International Festival of the New Latin American Cinema in Havana, and Cortázars Por primera vez will be screened during the workshop. A sample of Cuban and Swedish documentaries by the filmmakers attending the workshop will also be screened at the Glauber Rocha Hall in the FNCL and the Ruben Martinez Villena Hall in UNEAC.

Outstanding among the titles are El Fanguito (Jorge Luis Sanchez), Existen (experimental documentary film by Esteban Insausti, awarded in the last International Festival of the New Latin American Cinema), Prostitution Behind the Veil (a repeatedly awarded documentary film by the Swedish-Iranian director Nahid Persson), and Dont Worry, It Will Probably Pass (a sensitive documentary by filmmaker Cecilia Neant Falk on homosexualism).

This first Meeting-Workshop intends to become a regular space of exchange for photographers, sound engineers, editors and other documentary film professionals.

Source: By Karina Paz; CubaNow