Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos ICAIC (Cuban Institute for Cinematography and Film Industry) was created on March 24, 1959, shortly after the Cuban Revolution , by the new government's first cultural law.

description

The law states that “film is art”. With this, the separation from the almost exclusively commercial Cuban film productions before the revolution of 1959 was established. Most of the first ICAIC employees were members of the July 26th Revolutionary Movement, led by Fidel Castro . Founding director Alfredo Guevara had been a close confidante of Castro since they studied together at the University of Havana .

While in the 1960s mainly documentaries , shorts and educational films were produced in addition to a few feature films , since the 1970s increasingly complex full-length feature films with a very unique style have been made, some of which have won important international art awards.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the ICAIC came under massive financial pressure in the wake of the Cuban economic crisis and could hardly make any films of its own. Cuban films from this period were made possible with external financing, especially from Spain, but often also adapted to the needs of their financiers. Many filmmakers left Cuba in order to continue producing films.

After the turn of the millennium, new Cuban filmmaking with young directors emerged on the basis of the consolidated economic framework. Films like La vida es silbar ( Life, a Whistle ) or Suite Habana tie in with the traditions of post-revolutionary Cuban cinema, but work with distinctly new impulses in terms of content and form.

In 2009 the negatives of the ICAIC were included in the World Document Heritage .

A few months after the death of the founder and long-time director of the ICAIC, Alfredo Guevara, the psychologist and previous deputy Roberto Smith was appointed as the new president of the film institute in August 2013.

Well-known Cuban directors (selection)

Well-known Cuban films (selection)

Musical experiments

The creation of the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora (group for sound experiments) of the ICAIC in 1969 under the direction of Leo Brouwer was decisive for the development of the Nueva Trova musical genre . The task of this group was actually the production of film music , in fact it developed into a musical home for young artists with their own record label and great independence. The most prominent members included Silvio Rodríguez , Pablo Milanés and Sergio Vitier .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ El psicólogo Roberto Smith asume la presidencia del ICAIC , in: Diario de Cuba of August 30, 2013 (Spanish)