A Film Festival Without Glitz? Only in Cuba

No limousines or motorcades. No pampered stars or pushy paparazzi. At the 24th International Festival of New Latin American Film, Hollywood and its flashy entourage are conspicuously absent.

Cubans say they like their proletarian style of celebrating cinema and disdain the displays of wealth and exclusivity at just about every other film festival on the planet.

Few complain about the lack of star-studded glamour. What’s important, they say, is that American films make their way here by hook or by crook, opening a window into the other world that looms so large across so narrow a frontier.

“We would welcome a bigger American presence here, but Tinseltown glitz has nothing to do with the Cuban people or Cuban reality,” insists festival director Ivan Giroud.

But this week’s airing of nearly 500 films from throughout the Western Hemisphere, including 45 U.S. productions, is giving Cuba’s avid moviegoers a look at the forbidden materialism of the norteamericanos and subliminally testing their commitment to loftier social objectives.

Elegant clothes, opulent furnishings and tables groaning with food form an alluring yet unattainable backdrop in many of the films from the region’s more prosperous countries. That reinforces a sense of moral superiority among supporters of the regime while compounding feelings of failure and deprivation among the rest.

“I like Hollywood’s suspense films, but for the most part I prefer movies from Cuba and Latin America. They’re more realistic,” says Tomy Magos, a 33-year-old newspaper production worker who, like many Cubans, manages to take in a movie about once a week despite a profound recession limiting the average wage to about $10 a month. A cinema ticket costs 1 peso, or less than 4 cents.

“People always find the money to go to the movies, even if it’s their last peso,” says Maggie Alarcon, a Cuban cinema official who grew up in the United States when her father was a U.N. diplomat. “Sometimes going to the movies is a person’s only true moment of relaxation.”

Especially in these times of economic crisis, movies are the favorite escape of many Cubans, and the 11-day festival, which ends Friday, gives them a concentrated look at what the capitalist world has to offer.

The view of the United States, derived from both film and television, is often unflattering. Spanish-language versions of “Sex and the City” indulgence and “Sopranos” machinations elicit more disgust among Cubans than envy. Among the few U.S. box-office successes at the film festival are “In the Bedroom” and “Frida,” the former reinforcing Cuban views of the United States as a society shattered by handgun violence and the latter presenting socialist artists and intellectuals in their 1930s glory.

“Our films are more professional. I like U.S. films, but I respect Latin American films more. They don’t glorify social problems,” says Dayree Veliz, a 29-year-old secretary.

Alfredo Guevara, the ideological godfather of Cuban cinema and close confidant of President Fidel Castro, argues that there is a larger role to be played by American movies in this country, as filmmakers connect with the people irrespective of political divides.

“Hollywood is much more liberal than the political establishment,” says Guevara, who cannot resist an urge to suggest that U.S. films expose the foibles of America’s culture. “Hollywood produces extraordinarily valuable films about social conformity that are important for understanding the complexity of life.”

Guevara, the longtime chief of the Cuban Institute of Cinematic Art and Industry, who is now retired, says that more U.S. films should be shown in his homeland but that some committee of “wise men” should filter the offerings for offensive content.

“It’s an issue of perception and of proportion. I wouldn’t want to see the products of one country occupying all the cinema screens of my country as they do elsewhere,” Guevara says.

Some U.S. directors and producers come for the festival, invoking a cultural-exchange exclusion in the travel ban. Most are little-known or independents, but a visit last month by Steven Spielberg and one made by Kevin Costner last year to show his Cuban missile crisis film, “Thirteen Days,” have raised expectations of more collaboration -- and more glamour.

Cuban movie houses rarely show American box-office hits because a U.S. commercial embargo prevents their sale and the government can’t afford to convert pirated videos for their antiquated projectors. But viewers and film officials say about 80% of movies on television are purloined U.S. productions.

“What we see in American films is a lot of violence,” says Iriam Salasar, a 27-year-old microbiologist waiting in line with two friends to buy tickets to “Frida.” “But I like U.S. films, especially dramas. They have an appeal that transcends our differing outlooks.”