By MARTA HEPLER DRAHOS
mdrahos@record-eagle.com
TRAVERSE CITY — A contingent of Cuban filmmakers here for the Traverse City Film Festival got a standing ovation Friday as they took the stage at the City Opera House for a morning panel discussion.
Filmmaker Ian Padron, director of the Cuban baseball documentary "Dreaming in Blue," presented festival founder Michael Moore with a baseball cap from the Havana-based team Industriales, considered the New York Yankees of Cuban baseball. Padron then donned a Yankees cap.
The panel featured Padron, "Viva Cuba!" Director Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti, "Strawberry and Chocolate" actress Mirta Ibarra, and Cuban Film Institute Vice-President Rosa Maria Rovira. It focused on Cuba's vibrant and virtually undiscovered film industry, including the difficulties of making movies there.
The four filmmakers told of a country that is poor in resources — "$10,000 is like 12 years of living in Cuba," Malberti said — but rich in arts like dance, visual art, music and theater. They said filmmaking is an increasingly important art in Cuba, home of a government-supported film institute, national and international film schools, and a Havana film festival that focuses on the promotion of Spanish-language filmmakers.
"The conditions are so hard that you have to dream (through art)," Malberti said.
Many movies are made with the support of the film institute, which is in charge of distributing, sponsoring and producing films, Rovira said. Created in 1959, the institute also has helped educate Cuban audiences.
"The type of films they were used to seeing were not Cuban and did not reflect the reality of their country," Rovira said through a translator. Now Cubans are "very fond of cinema and knowledgeable — not just of our cinema but international cinema. They will speak with a similar level of depth about a ball game and about cinema."
Rovira said in the beginning most Cuban films were funded by the institute. Since an economic crisis in the 1990s, it has been difficult to produce films without agreements with other countries.
Some filmmakers also are making films independently, Malberti said. And a new generation of filmmakers is tackling issues the national cinema has not let them address, like "drugs, sports figures who have left the country and other problems."
The panel said much of the credit goes to Ibarra, whose Oscar-nominated "Strawberry and Chocolate" with husband and director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea helped break down barriers. The 1994 film, which at first caused an uproar in Cuba, is the story of an unlikely friendship between a gay dissident and a party-line student.
"In Cuba's case it completely changed the Cuban mentality, changed people's relationships," Ibarra said through a translator. "It not only touches on tolerance of gay people but tolerance in general."
Ibarra said women's roles in Cuban film also have changed since the 1980s, when her character in one movie, a single mother who enters into a relationship, was perceived by some as a prostitute.
"Now women can have any role in movies, but the movie where I play a strong intellectual who can question anything still has not been made," she said.
Bringing the Cuban filmmakers to Traverse City could be the start of a "sister city film festival," Moore said. He proposed bringing the Havana Film Festival here after its appearance in New York in April.
