HAVANA FANTASIA.

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  • Author(s): Johnson, Brian D.
  • Source:
    Maclean's. 1/10/2005, Vol. 118 Issue 2, p46-48. 3p. 5 Color Photographs.
  • Additional Information
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    • Abstract:
      This article focuses on the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema held in Havana, Cuba. It was insane, skipping off to Cuba at the height of the holiday movie season. For years, my Colombian friend Ramiro Puerta--musician, filmmaker and programmer with Toronto's film festival--had tried to drag me to the Havana festival. I'm in a vast room on the 23nd floor of the Habana Libre hotel--a monument to American modernism that was erected as a proud new Hilton just before the Cuban revolution, then abruptly confiscated and rechristened. Among the premieres at this festival is I Am Cuba, The Siberian Mammoth, a Brazilian documentary that tells the amazing story of 1964's Soy Cuba (" I Am Cuba"), a monumental epic by Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov. Lounging in a great wicker chair on the terrace of the venerable Hotel Nacional de Cuba, British filmmaker Sally Potter tells me the U.S. wouldn't allow her star, Joan Allen, to attend her Havana screening of Yes--made in response to 9/11, it's a romance between an Irish-American scientist and a Lebanese cook that ends, idyllically, in Cuba.