The New Yorker:

Gómez, the first woman to direct movies in Cuba, created a body of work that’s revolutionary in form and politics alike.

By Richard Brody

The effort to yoke radical politics to radical aesthetics—to make art that’s revolutionary both in content and form—is as central to modernity as revolution itself is. The Cuban director Sara Gómez, who died in 1974, at the age of thirty-one, is one of the few directors to have truly achieved this synthesis. Before her life was cut short, by asthma, Gómez made about twenty short documentaries, starting in 1961, two years after the Cuban Revolution. In 1974, she shot her only feature-length film, “One Way or Another,” completed posthumously, which mixes a romantic drama with documentary sequences. This feature and fourteen of the shorts are coming to the Criterion Channel on February 1st, bringing to wide attention a body of work that was in the creative and political forefront of its time and, in many ways, remains so even now.

Gómez, born in 1942, into a family of middle-class professionals, was the first female Cuban director—indeed, even now the only Cuban woman to have made a feature—and women’s lives and conflicts are at the center of her films. She was also Black, and her work emphasized the significance of Black culture in Cuba, along with the discrimination that Black Cubans faced. In addition to her identity, her background, and her politics, a kind of cinematic genealogy was crucial to her development of a personalized yet political sense of form: when Agnès Varda visited Cuba in 1962, Gómez worked as her assistant, and the two became friends. Varda photographed Gómez, and a batch of those photos appear in Varda’s 1963 film “Salut les Cubains,” which is also on the Criterion Channel.

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