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• Arts and Culture
• Cinema
• 11 / 02 / 2007

He first appeared in the early 1980s, with Echoes, but before that he had worked in cinema as Fan and amateur.

His start and successful career is a sort of recognition to those Cuban filmmaker-to-be who comply with these characteristics: outsider, self-centered, not professional or gregarious.

At present he is deep in the filming of a movie about the poet Jose Lezama Lima, a real tour de force for any director due to the apparently iconoclast singularity of the writer.

This is Tomas Piard's personal version for Cubasí.cu

- You were the man who ran inventory to Lezama Lima's house and also the guardianship to the first exhibition about the writer. What did Lezama find in that handling?

The Lezama who has accompanied me during most of my life, ever since the huge and deep poet he was.


- Your announced film on Lezama what stage is it going through? Will it be a biography or an approach to his work? Lezama, a man of language and such everlasting topics, what contribution represent to cinema?

Its going through the sound postproduction stage.

The film will be an approach to Lezama since his novel PARADISO, going through autobiographic passages, as well as of interviews that different investigators and journalists made to the poet, but at the same time everything will be seen from my personal perspective, that is, what Lezama has left in me. All everything under the eye of cinema language, never an attempt to imitate his literary images.

- Echoes just turned 20 years old. How do you see that film from the distance?

Echoes, is a surpassed film. I am very fond of it. It was the beginning of a new stage in my creative life, and unquestionably the work that opened the doors to my professional career.

- Why have you tried to remain as an independent film director?

Who said I keep myself as an independent film director? Since 1989 I began to work with ICAIC and in the Cuban Television, besides works I carried out in Europe (Spain, Russia, and Switzerland) with producers of those countries.

- Do you consider yourself the only follower of author cinema in Cuba?

I don't think I am the only follower of author cinema in Cuba. Theres Fernando Perez as the greatest expression we have in the Island regarding author cinema.

- Why your closeness to theater?

I dont know. Maybe for mysterious circumstances of life and destiny. Every theatrical texts I have adapted to audiovisual withhold ideas and topics which I find very close and its for this reason that I have taken possession of them.

- Why do you like Carlos Diazs work?

I think Carlos and I walk the same aesthetic and ideological paths, its just that he does it in theater and I in the audiovisual. It was very pleasing for me to adapt two staging to audiovisual.

- Which is your concept of script?

The script is the necessary foundation a movie must have. The starting point, to be even violated afterwards.

- Do you prefer white and black?

I like white and black very much, although since 1991 I havent shot a film in this way again.

- Would you do a soap opera?

Never. I am not interested a bit in this genre. That will never be an artistic fact.

- You, a movie-goer educated in Hollywood cinema, would like to make a thriller, suspense or a western?

Who said I was educated in Hollywood cinema? I educated myself with the cinema of Eastern Europe and Europe in general. Those genres are completely foreign to me which doesn't mean I consider important some works carried out in them.

- How has it been your approach to television?

My approach to television has been very successful. I have been able to carry out many works in it of which I feel very proud, since I have been able to make them with absolute creative freedom. Always considering the potential spectator as an educated and observant person in order to establish the necessary communication I want to establish with him.

- What good have been the courses on museology, Oriental Art and children psychology?

Everything one learns can serve a purpose in life at a certain moment. Everything has been useful.

Source: By Jorge Smith, CubaSi