De cierta manera

This posthumous film from Sara Gómez (1942-1974) looks back at the Cuban revolution (1953-1959) and La Habana radical urban and social transformations. Intertwining “some real and fictional characters,” as the filmmaker stated, De cierta manera presents the difficulty, or impossibility for a romantic couple, to live up to the revolutionary expectations of the “Hombre nuevo”—the “New Man” as coined by Che Guevara, a notion that describes a Marxist paradigm of a “new” human being turned toward collectivity, with access to universal education and health care, able to leave behind gendered and racialized forms of oppression. Trained as a musician and ethnologist, Sara Gómez’s first and last feature responds to the author’s need to “politically and ideologically decolonize,” and presents the hardships of that never ending process. Digital restoration courtesy of the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos (ICAIC).