Memories of Underdevelopment

It shares today's other film — 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) — in asking the same question: when the world is rewritten, do you stay or leave? Only this one turns the camera on the man who stays yet can no longer tune to the frequency of his time. From 1968 to 2007, two systems and two continents apart, the question does not change.

Sergio是哈瓦那的一名家具销售员，身上还带着革命前资产阶级知识分子的从容。妻子和父母在革命后前往迈阿密，他选择独自留在古巴。 影片没有明确的故事线，更像一段被记忆切碎的内心独白：他回顾从革命到导弹危机之间的社会变迁，穿插与女友Elena、与Hanna的情感，也不断打量这座正在变形的城市。镜头常常越过他的肩膀，把哈瓦那的街景、游行、拆迁塞进他的视线，仿佛记忆本身就是这样无序地涌来。

It is one of the most frequently cited works of Cuban cinema and the wider 'Third Cinema' movement, and it made its director, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the most internationally recognised name in Cuban film. The film appears in The New York Times' top ten of 1968 and in the Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll (tied for 169th), and was screened in the Cannes Classics strand in 2016. What is singular is the method: Alea braids documentary street footage, intertitles and fiction into a fragmented grammar that mimics the workings of memory, to film how a man slips out of step with his time. It neither defends Sergio nor judges him — it simply lays on screen a dislocation that belongs both to one person and to a nation in transition.