40 YEARS OF CUBA'S VENICE'S INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF CINEMATOGRAPHIC ART

In the last edition of the 74th Venice International Film Festival, North American director Jon Alpert presented his documentary film Cuba and the Cameraman. This famous investigative journalist and documentary director has traveled around the world, reporting from Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, China, the Philippines, Afghanistan and, of course, from Cuba. He has a very special bond with this country, in which he has filmed for forty years, documenting an important period of Cuban history.

The documentary focuses on the changes and processes of construction of the socialist state not with a political vision, but from a very intimate and personal perspective. Since his first time in Cuba in 1972, Alpert has found several people whom he interviewed again in all of his successive stays, strengthening bonds of true friendship with them. He managed to interview Fidel many times, followed him on his first visit to the United States and even saw him shortly before his death.

In Cuba and the Cameraman there are no images of a tourist Cuba: there are no mojitos or bright Chevrolets of the fifties, as in the tourist magazines. On the contrary, there are engravings of provinces, of peasants posing among their canes and cows, of workers from the marginal neighbor- hoods in their daily struggles for surviving. There are families marked by the misfortune of the separation between Havana and Miami, with children who see mothers leave. The most important thing is that everything is filmed with a lot of respect for them, not to show them with their difficulties, but to show the foreign spectator the tremendous strength of the Cuban people, in their daily life. Alpert does not denounce anything, he criticizes nothing: he films and teaches, so that everyone can see what they never see about Cuba, always with simplicity and sensitivity.