Documentary
Coffea arábiga
Nicolás Guillén Landrián · 1968
Synopsis
Commissioned as a didactic documentary on the Cordón de La Habana, a campaign meant to surround the capital with coffee plants, fruit trees and peas, the film becomes a collage of photographs and archives, set to music by the Beatles, the Jazz Crusaders and Armando Guerra. It traces the history of coffee, from slavery to the revolution, and contrasts white women drying the beans with black women in a noisy threshing factory.
Context
After prison, the author is assigned to the department of scientific and technical documentaries, where he is given this film. He takes up the rapid editing, the zooms and the archives of Santiago Álvarez, but turns them inward: according to Anne Garland Mahler, the film shows the persistence of racial hierarchies inherited from the colony. The pairing of images of Fidel Castro with The Fool on the Hill, when the Beatles were banned on the radio, is said to be the cause of its censorship; shown, it was withdrawn when the coffee plan failed. It ends on “Fin pero no es el fin”.
Who it is for
A short film of about eighteen minutes, in Spanish; everything rests on the gap between the commission and the images.
Prizes and reception
No prize. In 2015, Anne Garland Mahler sees in it a critique of the question of race under the revolution.