Through dramas of three women from different classes in three different crucial historical moments, Solás explores women’s personal and political struggles in Cuba and the road ahead.

The film shifts from the last days of Havana’s aristocracy in 1895 during the Spanish-American war, to the struggle against Machado’s dictatorship in the 1930s to the plight of a peasant girl in the 1960s whose education, despite the revolution, is held back by outdated gender roles. Shifting in style with each period from baroque melodrama to soviet montage, Solás rejects narrative conventions to find new forms. He explained “because our history has been filtered through a bourgeois lens, we have been compelled to live with terrible distortions. We lacked a coherent, lucid, and dignified appreciation of our national past.”

Known for its innovative filmmaking techniques for a new Latin American cinema (and ‘third cinema’) as well as its politics: exceptional camera work, unique handheld sequences, and the use of music as a narrative form. The stunning soundtrack is by Cuban guitarist and composer Leo Brouwer who led the experimental sound for film unit in Havana.

The screening will be introduced by a Cuban film specialist.