''Cecilia'' is a 1982 Cuban
drama film
In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. Drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular super ...
directed by
Humberto Solás
Humberto Solás (4 December 1941 – 18 September 2008) was a Cuban film director, credited with directing the film ''Lucía'' (1968), which explored the lives of Cuban women during different periods in Cuban history.
His cinematic style bor ...
. The film is based on the novel ''
Cecilia Valdés
''Cecilia Valdés'' is both a novel by the Cuban writer Cirilo Villaverde (1812–1894), and a zarzuela based on the novel. It is a work of importance for its quality, and its revelation of the interaction of classes and races in Havana, C ...
'' by
Cirilo Villaverde. It was entered into the
1982 Cannes Film Festival
The 35th Cannes Film Festival was held from 14 to 26 May 1982. The Palme d'Or was jointly awarded to ''Missing'' by Costa Gavras and '' Yol'' by Şerif Gören and Yılmaz Güney.
The festival opened with the 1916 film '' Intolerance'', directed ...
.
Plot
The film takes place in 19th-century
Cuba
Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribbea ...
. Cuban society is split over race, as there are deep divisions between the whites, their black slaves, and the
mulattos
(, ) is a racial classification to refer to people of mixed African and European ancestry. Its use is considered outdated and offensive in several languages, including English and Dutch, whereas in languages such as Spanish and Portuguese ...
, people of mixed race, that are caught in between. The story follows Cecilia (Daisy Granados), her experiences with love, and the beginnings of the Cuban slave rebellion.
Cast
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Daisy Granados
Daisy Granados (born 9 December 1942) is a Cuban film actress. She has appeared in more than 40 films since 1964. At the 11th Moscow International Film Festival in 1979, she won the award for Best Actress for her role in '' Portrait of Teresa'' ...
*
Imanol Arias
Manuel María Arias Domínguez (born 26 April 1956 in Riaño, León, Spain) better known as Imanol Arias, is a Spanish actor and film director.
Career
Imanol Arias began his career with a travelling theatre group performing in the Basque Co ...
*
Raquel Revuelta
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Miguel Benavides
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Eslinda Núñez
Critical reception
Solás's 1982 megaproduction, the most expensive project undertaken by ICAIC to date, was released simultaneously as a six-hour miniseries for Spanish television, a four-hour motion picture for Cuban audiences, and a two-hour film for international release. According to Michael Chanan, "no Cuban film ever prodded a raw nerve more insistently that this one, revealing in the process the dangers of interfering with certain types of cultural icons." Critics were unanimous in their outrage and disgust at Solás's ''versión libre'' of a canonical work and, yet, Solás consistently spoke of Cecilia as a successful film in personal terms until his death in 2008.
Solás erased the most shocking element of the novel - that, unbeknownst to them, Cecilia and Leonardo were sister and brother and, thus, incestuous lovers - and inserted, instead, a subtext that emphasizes
Santería as the force that shapes the destiny of the characters. While the film shares with the novel an abolitionist stance and an abhorrence of the racist practices that permeated colonial Cuban society, it highlights the importance of religious syncretism and transculturation in a way that Villaverde's work could not.
Solás's film is a 20th-century response to a canonical text, grounded in the teachings of Fernando Ortiz,
Lydia Cabrera
Lydia Cabrera (May 20, 1899, in Havana, Cuba – September 19, 1991, in Miami, Florida) was a Cuban independent ethnographer.
Cabrera was a Cuban writer and literary activist. She was an authority on Santería and other Afro-Cuban religions. D ...
, Natalia Bolívar, Miguel Barnet and other scholars who claim that Afro-Cuban culture is an integral part of Cuban national identity. By bringing Santería into the open and casting Cecilia as a practitioner of it, Solás makes visible that which was invisible in the 19th century novel. He resurrects the belief system of Villaverde's black and mulatto characters, making it central to the plot of his film and drawing clear parallels between it and Catholicism as contentious systems of reference in colonial society. Equally important, the projection of a religious theme on to a 19th-century-storyline allows Solás to look at something suppressed and driven underground in Cuba at the time his film was made: the continued presence of Santería as an undercurrent in contemporary Cuban culture and its power to subvert dominant paradigms. It was this aspect of the film that agitated and inflamed critics like Mario Rodríguez Alemán, who called the ending of the film "repulsive," condemned it for its "excessive religious charge," the predominance of the "sacred," and "the priority given to myth, oneiricism, mysticism, and folklore," which relegated "the political and social connotations of Villaverde's original to the background."
[Chanan, Michael. ''Cuban Cinema''. Minneapolis: U Minn. Press, 2004. 393.]
See also
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List of Cuban films
This is an incomplete list of films produced in Cuba in chronological order. For an A-Z list of films currently on Wikipedia see :Cuban films.
1890s
1900s
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
200 ...
References
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Cecilia
1982 films
1980s Spanish-language films
1982 drama films
Films directed by Humberto Solás
Cuban drama films
Works about Santería