In the 1960s, Nicolás Guillén Landrián became the first Black director in Cuba. His films were as far removed from Italian neorealism as they were from Socialist realism and closer to those of an auteur such as Chris Marker. In some ways, he anticipated contemporary non-fiction with his observational skills and his ability to imbue the surface of everything he depicted with a sense of life and inner-feeling. The distinctive style and personality of such an artist inevitably conflicted with the authorities in revolutionary Cuba: his documentaries were censored and he was both imprisoned and confined to a psychiatric institution. He went into exile in Miami, where he died in 2003.
I first discovered Landrián in a local cinema during my childhood. I saw his Ociel del Toa many times. My parents were mountaineering instructors and until the age of five I lived among the people and landscapes depicted in that splendid film. After several decades of obscurity, Landrián began to be reappraised. Admiration for his documentaries was accompanied by revelations about the injustices he had suffered.
In 2019 I visited the ICAIC archives and was struck by how poorly much of the materials they housed were preserved. That is when I decided to restore Landrián’s films. This documentary is part of that project and, thanks to the testimony of his widow Gretel Alfonso and his director of photography Livio Delgado, it allows us to get very close to both the man and the artist.
What makes Landrián’s case particularly interesting is what it reveals about what was happening at that time in Cuba. My country was undergoing one of the darkest periods in its history. The government and its people were drifting further apart. The country offered no future for its youth. For all these reasons, recalling Landrián’s story and rewatching his cinema is not only of historical interest, it is a political act.

Ernesto Daranas Serrano