Humberto Solás: Lucía

Humberto Solás LucíaCuba, 1968, 35mm, 159 min

A key work of the revolutionary cinema of Cuba, Humberto Solás Lucía 1968 tells the story of modern Cuba through three generations of women each named Lucia. The film shifts through historical periods exploring different social classes from the last dates of Havana’s aristocracy in 1895 during Spanish-American war, to the struggle against Gerardo 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in the 1930s to the plight of a peasant girl in the 1960s whose education, despite the revolution, is held back by outdated gender roles.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, Lucía unpacks narrative conventions to find new forms appropriate to the revolutionary context, history and culture of Central America. As Solás has stated ‘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.’