The Malaga Film Festival premiered “Retrato de un artista siempre adolescente (Una historia de cine en Cuba)”, a documentary on the figure of the Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa, produced by the Cuban Institute of Art and the Cinematographic Industry (ICAIC) with the participation of The Mediapro Studio.
Directed by Manuel Herrera, “Retrato de un artista siempre adolescente (Una historia de cine en Cuba)” has as its axis the life of García Espinosa, although it is not a typical biography. Emblematic name of the so-called “new Latin American cinema”, film director, screenwriter, writer and active promoter and leader of the Cuban cultural sector, García Espinosa was one of the founders of ICAIC and its president between 1983 and 1991. His filmography includes 14 titles, including six fiction feature films and documentary films, as well as screenwriting collaborations with such well-known names in Cuban cinematography such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea or Humberto Solás.
As reflected in the documentary, his career gives rise to a broad reflection on the emergence and development of Cuban revolutionary cinematography with its struggles, contradictions and confrontations with dogmatic thought, which at times seems to dominate the Cuban political-cultural spectrum, and the always difficult, risky and necessary relationship between officials and artists.
The source of cinematographic inspiration for Julio García Espinosa was Italian Neorealism. An essential fact changed his childhood: his father's success in designing and selling a highly functional sofa that he called Aspacia. In the style of the old works of neorealism, a narrator tells us about the family environment of the protagonist's childhood. That narrator, who is voiced by Fernando Hecheverría, is the Aspacia sofa that guides us throughout the documentary, sometimes dialoguing, even humorously, with the protagonist, in the style of his own cinematographic works.
The common thread of the story is marked by the filmmaker's testimonies, through which we learn about his thinking and his theories about cinema in general and about his films. “Retrato de un artista siempre adolescente (Una historia de cine en Cuba)” is a first-person account of her artistic-ideological thinking. Although the testimonies of other filmmakers also appear, it maintains a narrative structure framed in the documentary-essay, taking advantage of some narrative elements typical of fiction cinema, without abandoning a strong experimental vocation in line with the work of García Espinosa.