Curator:  Bruno Bové
Name artist: Catherine Murphy
Title of the work you have chosen: MAESTRA
English title: TEACHER
Year of production: Cuba/USA 2011 – 33’ release: 2012
Format: video (DVD)

ENGLISH SUBTITLED VERSION IN LOW QUALITY (click on read more)

In July 2015 we have screened the film 'Maestra' with permission of the filmmaker and their distributor Women Make Movies. For the future, they allow us to show you this 8 minute-version film, about The Cuban Literacy Campaign in 1961. This film explores this controversial experience through the eyes of the women teachers, and how it changed their sense of themselves.

About the curator
Name: Bruno Bové
Your work: civil servant – translator French into Dutch
What is your main interest: cinema, politics
Country: Belgium
 
About the film and the filmmaker:

What can you tell about this film?
This film is equally informative, touching and inspiring. It is about the way in which ten tenthousands of teenage girls fought against illiteracy on the countryside.     

How does this film relates to the theme ‘politics and poetry’ in your opinion?
This film is much more than a lifeless enumeration of the different stages of the campaign. This film does not only shows how the women changed the countryside, but it concentrates in the first place on how the project changed themselves. About the way how they broke out of their traditional lives and macho-culture. It shows how they gained self consiousness for the rest of their lives.

Are politics and poetry (or politics and arts) two separate worlds according to you? Why / why not?
Everything is political, but not all politics are poetic! Except when you believe in 'l’art pour l’art', but in fact that is a poltical statement already.
 
In addition to the theme of ‘Politics and poetry’, are there any other comparisons between this artist and Ivens according to you?
First of all, 1961 was the year that the litercy campagin started and in this year Ivens also filmed two films in Cuba: Pueblo Armado & Carnet de Viaje. Even though these films had a very authentic approach, they were also meant to teach filmmaking to new young filmmakers. This was his answer to the call of the young Cuban revolution. To understand this, please read the introduction of my article Soy Cuba / Ya Kuba:

DEVELOPMENT AND COPRODUCTIONS
At the 1st of January 1959 the Cuban revolution triumphs. At the 24th of March 1959, the ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte y Industria Cinematográficos), introduced a new law that resulted in a feature movie 'Historias de la Revolución' (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea), that was influenced by Italian neorealism. According to Ambrosio Fornet (30 years film in the revolution), the new Cuban films has a new stage of development in the years 1959 untill 1965: "Because the lack of national tradition, the Italian neorealism, the French Nouvelle Vague, the American independent cinema, the Sovject classics etcetera must be repeated. It was the challenge to keep the best things out of these different styles, in order to create a national, con-conformist, cheap and profitable cinema". To pressure the expenses and to outweight the lack of experience, they appealed to foreign (financially) disinterested filmmakers to come to Cuba and to educate new Cuban filmmakers. At the one hand by giving seminars and on the other hand by setting up copproductions. Among them there were the dutchman Joris Ivens, The frenchmen Chris Marker and Agnes Varda and Ugo Olive from Uruguay.

In fact, Ivens did more or less the same as what the urban youth did in the countryside at that time: Sharing their knowledge in order to support a political emancipating project. In turn, Catherine Murphy digs up this history of the literacy campaign of 1961 and started a Literacy Project in 2004. She collects testimonies to spread again in order to support other literacy campaigns in both north America and Latin America. In 2013 Catherina Murphy revealed on Cuban television (Catherine Murphy, autora del documental `Maestra´: `La alfabetización de Cuba fue uno de los momentos más trascendentales en la historia de América Latina´) that she wants to complement her film Maestra with testimonies of male-volunteers. Maybe this campaign was not equally impressive for them as it was for female volunteers, but nevertheless it changed their lives as well because they suddenly had to share positions and tasks with girls. That was very unusal for them, because they grew up in a plain macho-society.

(Bruno Bové refers to this website to find more debate and films about Cuba)   

 

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