Memories of Underdevelopment
This film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is the most renowned work in the history of Cuban cinema. After his wife and family flee in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the bourgeois intellectual Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) passes his days wandering Havana in idle reflection, his amorous entanglements and political ambivalence gradually giving way to a mounting sense of alienation. With this adaptation of an innovative novel by Edmundo Desnoes, Gutiérrez Alea developed a cinematic style as radical as the times he was chronicling, creating a collage of vivid impressions through the use of experimental editing techniques, archival material, and spontaneously shot street scenes. Intimate and densely layered, Memories of Underdevelopment provides an indictment of its protagonist’s disengagement and an extraordinary glimpse of life in postrevolutionary Cuba.
Memories of Underdevelopment was restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). Restoration funded by the George Lucas Family Foundation and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project.
Special Features
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New interviews with film critics B. Ruby Rich and José Antonio Évora
- New interview with novelist and screenwriter Edmundo Desnoes
- Titón: From Havana to “Guantanamera,” a 2008 feature-length documentary on director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s life and career
- Segment from a 1989 audio interview with Gutiérrez Alea
- Segments from 2017 interviews with actor Daisy Granados and editor Nelson Rodríguez from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Visual History Program collection
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- Plus: An essay by author Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
New cover by Danijel Žeželj
Special Features
- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- New interviews with film critics B. Ruby Rich and José Antonio Évora
- New interview with novelist and screenwriter Edmundo Desnoes
- Titón: From Havana to “Guantanamera,” a 2008 feature-length documentary on director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s life and career
- Segment from a 1989 audio interview with Gutiérrez Alea
- Segments from 2017 interviews with actor Daisy Granados and editor Nelson Rodríguez from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Visual History Program collection
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
- Plus: An essay by author Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
New cover by Danijel Žeželj
Cast
- Sergio Corrieri
- Sergio
- Daisy Granados
- Elena
- Omar Valdés
- Pablo
- Eslinda Núñez
- Noemi
- Beatriz Ponchora
- Laura
- Cruz
- Elena’s brother
Credits
- Director
- Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
- Produced by
- Miguel Mendoza
- Screenplay by
- Edmundo Desnoes
- Screenplay by
- Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
- Based on a novel by
- Edmundo Desnoes
- Director of photography
- Ramón F. Suarez
- Film editor
- Nelson Rodríguez
- Music by
- Leo Brouwer
- Conducted by
- Manuel Duchesne Cuzán
- Special performance by
- Pello el Afrokán
- Production designer
- Julio Matilla
- Costume designer
- Elba Pérez
- Sound
- Eugenio Vesa
- Sound
- Germinal Hernández
- Sound
- Carlos Fernández
A scene from Memories of Underdevelopment
