De cierta manera

What is a story without context? For Sara Gómez, nothing. DE CIERTA MANERA was the only feature the Cuban director shot before her untimely death in 1974 and bears lasting testimony to her unique talent: a work of formal radicality and political wisdom that now returns to the big screen in a shimmering new restoration.
A teacher named Yolanda meets a factory worker named Mario and they fall in love. One of Mario’s colleagues is going astray, and the children who Yolanda teaches are often aggressive; their respective approaches to these external issues will also inform their burgeoning relationship. Yet context is a malleable concept for Gómez and moves far beyond the couple’s immediate surroundings, as her restless curiosity expands outward in all directions at once, leaving fiction behind to embrace the essay and the documentary and taking real people along for the ride: Afro-Cuban traditions, post-Revolution social policy, the biography of a boxer turned musician, urban development, the shadow cast by colonialism, the roots of machismo. Story and context are insufficient concepts anyway when they’re as hopelessly intertwined as here: the love between two people born out of a remarkable director’s expression of love for Cuba, community, and cinema itself, ambivalent, hopeful, assured. (James Lattimer)

Sara Gómez: HISTORIA DE LA PIRATERÍA (1962, K), IRÉ A SANTIAGO (1964, K),EXCURSIÓN A VUELTA ABAJO (1965, K), GUANABACOA: CRÓNICAS DE MI FAMILIA (1966), Y ... TENEMOS SABOR (1967, K), EN LA OTRA ISLA (1968, K), UNA ISLA PARA MIGUEL (1968, K), ISLA DEL TESORO (1969, K), PODER LOCAL, PODER POPULAR (1970, K), ATENCIÓN PRENATAL (1972, K), AÑO UNO (1972, K), SOBRE HORAS EXTRAS Y TRABAJO VOLUNTARIO (1973, K)