Loading...

The Sugar Curtain

[2006]
TFF 07
Feature Documentary | 80 min
Photos (1)

Synopsis

Diaspora meets nostalgia on the crumbling pavements of Havana in this charming, provocative memoir. When the military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet toppled Chile's elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973, a transnational exile culture was born. Camila Guzmán Urzúa speaks for that culture's second generation. The filmmaker, daughter of renowned documentarian Patricio Guzmán (Battle of Chile; Chile, Obstinate Memory; The Pinochet Case), grew up in Cuba. In The Sugar Curtain, Guzmán recalls her Communist pioneer childhood as idyllic and returns to visit her one-time classmates. Few are left. Many have dispersed into yet another diaspora, driven away from Cuba by the hard times following the collapse of the U.S.S.R. and its subsidies. Those who remain grapple with how to make ends meet, but the people they feel sorry for are the children-who no longer grow up with an ebullient sense of having history in their hands. This elegantlyexecuted memoir-astonishingly, a debut film-takes on hard issues gracefully. Guzmán recognizes that her childhood paradise was a prison for many, and that her community of grandmothers could be, for some, a nest of informers. Leaving the post-Fidel speculation for others, the filmmaker focuses on what it meant to have world-changing dreams, with all their contradictions, on one small island. Letting her own story open the door to those of others, Guzmán engages us with the human drama of growing up socialist.

---Pat Aufderheide

About The Director(s)

CAMILA GUZMÁN URZÚA was born in Santiago de Chile in 1971, but at the age of two, her family moved to Havana, where she grew up. She left Cuba in 1990 and since then, has lived in Spain, England, Chile and for the last seven years, in France. Guzmán Urzúa studied film at Les Ateliers Varan in Paris and at the London College of Printing (LCPDT) where she earned a film and video degree in 1996. Since 1996 she has worked as an assistant director and produced documentary and fiction films. The Sugar Curtain is her first film.

Director Statement

I grew up in Cuba in the 1970s and 80s, the golden years of the Cuban Revolution, and I remember it being like paradise, a place without anxiety, problems or violence. My friends and I were pioneers and had a peaceful lifestyle. We all felt equal and neither unemployment nor religion existed. Solidarity reigned everywhere and in the streets there was no publicity, there was no rush. I remember being very happy.
It has been fifteen years since I left Cuba, yet it is always on my mind. Now, when I return, I feel like the country I grew up in has disappeared, that nothing remains, only a few dear friends, the bulidings facades and the sea. The film's initial purpose is to rescue the reality that we lived as children. It was a unique experience that the curtain of oblivion is erasing, and which is vital for me to recover and preserve, like a precious object that you keep safe in a box. Trying to recover the memory of my childhood, through this journey into the past, I also embarked on a journey into deception, which as an adult has turned into a complex reality.