“Chronic Dissidence”: IDFA Artistic Director Orwa Nyrabia on the Revolutionary Films of Sara Gómez (Spotlight on Cuba)

“As filmmakers we do not set out in search of definition. We consider that the daily life of these men, their stories and the culture they have created... are more important.”

These words appear close to the beginning of De bateyes, Sara Gómez’s poetic 1971 short about the lives of workers on Cuba’s sugarcane plantations. Spoken in voiceover by the director herself, they serve as a kind of mission statement for a filmmaker whose short but remarkable career was built on empathy and curiosity. Across the span of approximately a decade, from the early 1960s up until her untimely death in 1974, Gómez directed a series of shorts and one feature. Her films charted the lives of ordinary people during the early years of revolutionary rule. Despite the cruel curtailment of Gómez’s life—she died of an asthma attack aged 31, while her sole feature film De cierta manera (One Way or Another) was still in post-production—and relentless censorship of her work, her refreshing and deeply humane cinematic voice has endured.

Gómez’s ongoing relevance is emphasized by a retrospective that screened as part of the Spotlight on Cuba program at IDFA. Watching her films alongside more recent shorts, made by graduates of the country’s prestigious International Film and TV School (EICTV), reinforces the prescience of Gómez’s thematic concerns and aesthetic approach. Gómez was a committed socialist, whose work was funded by state institutions such as the Federation of Cuban Women, but she also saw the role of the filmmaker as that of truth-teller. Her films illustrate the persistence of class, gender, and racial divides, even as the propaganda machine was insisting that all revolutionaries were equal.

As the retrospective demonstrates, Gómez’s probing, curious films center the voices of ordinary people while avoiding easy answers. For instance, De bateyes opens with a series of questions posed by the filmmaker, who, in text and voiceover, tries and fails to arrive at a final definition of the term “bateye.” Instead, she hands the discussion over to the former sugar workers and their relatives, who are given the space to describe their experiences living on the plantations at length, interviews which Gómez frames with lyrical images of the island. In Mi aporte (My Contribution, 1972), her questioning becomes more confrontational, as she deconstructs propaganda film conventions. The film turns what initially appears to be an on-message report about female factory workers into a thoughtful reflection on the structural barriers—family life, sexism, implacable social conventions—that prevent women from fully participating in the labor force.

Films celebrating Creole and Afro-Cuban culture—such as joyous rumba documentary Y... tenemos sabor (And… We’ve Got Flavour, 1967) and Iré a Santiago (I’m Going to Santiago, 1964) which describes the influence of “mulatto” culture in Santiago de Cuba—are less politically overt, but still serve an activist function through the acknowledgment and preservation of the country’s diverse diasporic traditions. The most tender of them is Guanabacoa: Crónicas de mi familia (Chronicles of My Family, 1964), a wonderfully characterful portrait of Gómez’s family. In voiceover, Gómez reflects on her childhood growing up in a Black middle-class milieu: “old cousins, with pressed collars and straight ties… houses where clarinets were kept in old leather cases or yellow covers,” before handing the film over to her elderly godmother, who sparkles with mischief as she shares her reminiscences. Even that film, however, ends on a political note, as Gómez questions the need “to be a distinguished ‘bettered’ Black person.” Instead, she invites the viewer to “come to Guanabacoa, accepting the whole story.”

Gómez’s intersectional perspective reflected her own experience. When she joined the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) in 1961, she was the only woman and one of only two Black directors within the institute. ICAIC had been established to train a new generation of Cuban filmmakers, but it also sought to harness the potential of film for mass communication. As such, Gómez’s insistent critique of the limits of revolutionary transformation attracted the attention of the institute’s censorship officer. Many of films were effectively banned from the Cuban exhibition circuit during her lifetime, and this censorship continued after her death. For decades her work lay uncared for in the archives, and her name remained absent from official celebrations of Cuban cinema and revolutionary filmmaking.

Despite this neglect, Gómez’s memory lived on, stories of her life circulating quietly amongst small circles of Latin American filmmakers and feminist scholars. Her work occasionally surfaced at one-off screenings before disappearing again. A 2021 restoration of de cierta manera by Arsenal in Germany helped bring her new attention, as did a restoration project focusing on her shorts led by the Vulnerable Media Lab in Canada. The VML placed a charming disclaimer in front of these new restorations, serving as a reminder of the precarious backstory of this material: “the presence of mold, dirt and scratches attest to the traces of the film’s material and political history.”

The story of how Gómez’s films came to be buried and unearthed offers both a cautionary tale, about the way in which canons can calcify around received wisdom and partial truths, and a message of hope about the potential to rebuild film history in a new image. In this interview with IDFA’s Artistic Director Orwa Nyrabia (who is also a board member of IDA, which publishes Documentary), we discuss the ongoing relevance of Gómez’s work. This interview transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: Sara Gómez’s films are a centerpiece within your spotlight on Cuba. Why did you decide to have this focus as part of this year’s IDFA and how did Gómez’s work fit into this?

ORWA NYRABIA: In December last year, I was invited to visit the International Film and TV School (EICTV) in San Antonio de los Baños for the first time. It was a very meaningful experience to meet with the filmmakers in Cuba and to see what's happening there. I grew up in Syria, so I am very familiar with systems of repression, and with the place filmmakers can hold in the middle of a repressive system. In the histories of both Cuba and Syria, as well as in other countries, filmmakers were always at the forefront. They are usually the first to speak up and take risks. That has to do perhaps with the visibility we have in this field, which gives us a little more space to maneuver, to say things the others cannot say. But it also has to do with the conviction that comes from working in a space of artistic freedom.

Cuba is very special, from a historical viewpoint. In Cuba, it is always “you are either with us or against us,”—on the side of the Soviets or the side of the CIA—and the people who are living within this strange dichotomy are totally forgotten. When we look at Cuba, Sara Gómez is an amazing starting point because she was a revolutionary. It’s significant that Gómez was not an anti-revolutionary who thought that what was happening there was unacceptable. She was, in her own brilliant way, defending the revolution by being critical and by not staying on the surface of things. Rather than simply promoting ideas of the perfect revolution, she did not run away from the hard work that needs to be done in every detail of people’s lives, whether they are Afro-Cuban, or women. And that was censored.

The leftist censorship started with the Cuban regime, and the rest of the world's left joined in. If the Cuban regime did not like what Sara Gómez did, then her films would not be shown outside, in solidarity circles. It is only now in the past decade, because of the efforts of a new generation of feminists and LGBTQI+ people, that Gómez has been “rediscovered.” Rediscovered is a terribly offensive word, but the reality is that this great filmmaker has been left out of the past.

If we cannot change the present, because our impact on policies is limited and everything has already been set, then we cannot change the future. So what we have to do is change the past, which is defining our present. And the way this is done is by seeing that what we thought was the past is fake. The past we were taught did not have Sara Gómez in it. Yet there she was always there. By rewriting this history with these people in their rightful place, perhaps we can change the future. Maybe I'm daydreaming! But I'm happier daydreaming about this than not doing anything about it.

D: As you alluded to, there has been a gradual re-integration of Gómez's work into the canon. In the IDFA program notes, Cuban filmmaker Ricardo Acosto mentions that he first heard about Gómez’s work in the 1970s, from her former colleagues and friends. Later, in the 1990s, Acosto was able to show some of Gómez’s films to a new generation of filmmakers. As you indicate when you describe the word “rediscovered” as offensive, it is true that while her films were not in circulation, a kind of people’s memory of her work, kept alive by those who knew her, was still there. These films would resurface, then disappear again back into the vaults.

ON: Absolutely, there was knowledge of Gómez among Cuban filmmakers, which is a very small circle of people. Luna Hupperetz, who curated the retrospective, mentions in her essay about the program, that she tried to dig up references to Sara’s work in the history of leftist film screenings and events in the Netherlands. I don’t like to understand the work of a festival as a form of imposition. To me, what we always need to do is make persistent, strong suggestions. So in our presentation, we are trying not to present Gómez as a “rediscovery,” but rather as an obvious filmmaker. We are un-doing this cancellation which kept the work from us.

The way I see it, there are many people in the world today, in the film world but also on the streets of Amsterdam, in the universities and offices, who are looking for Gómez, but who don’t know that she is who they are looking for. We’re trying to help them find her. I don’t think that I need to bring all the people who would watch a Marvel film to watch Sara Gómez, but those who are looking for someone like her should know this is happening and this might help them to do what they want to do.

D: Gómez’s films were censored when they were first made, and kept hidden in the vaults of the archives for years. We’ve seen in other films in the festival, such as Miguel Coyula’s Chronicles of the Absurd, that the censorship faced by artists in Cuba right now is extremely difficult. How straightforward is it practically therefore to bring these films to IDFA? 

ON: Many of Sara Gómez’s films have been restored by the Vulnerable Media Lab in Canada. They don’t own the rights to the films, however. Those are connected to the Cuban archives. We are working directly with EICTV on a retrospective of graduation films, so there is a different aspect there. The Spotlight is our own curatorial take on history, and the EICTV retrospective was done together with the brilliant head of the documentary department at the school, the Mexican filmmaker Juliana Fanjul. 

The Spotlight on Cuba and the new releases, such as Chronicles of the Absurd, are totally separate. Chronicles of the Absurd tells a different story, but there is a serendipity here in that this film was made in the same year in which we are also doing this program about Cuba. That we happened to receive a brilliant entry from these Cuban filmmakers, who we had never heard of before, proves that this was the right moment to focus on the country.

D: There’s a thread about artistic and journalistic censorship running through the whole program, not just Gómez and the Cuban focus, but also elsewhere in films such as Roisin Agnew’s The Ban, Mahmoud Atassi’s Eyes of Gaza, Leila Amini’s A Sisters Tale and more. It’s sobering to see how these themes resonate from Gómez’s films right up until the present.

ON: As documentary people, we have a history of chronic dissidence. In my opening speech to the festival, I described a trip through documentary history, which started with Sara Gómez, and her assisting Agnes Varda, who then worked with Chris Marker. Chris Marker was sending film stock as a gift to Patricio Guzman, so he could make his work in Chile under Pinochet. Anand Patwardhan was the brother of Guzman in India, and Omar Amiralay in Syria. And they all learned from Dziga Vertov. They were all troublemakers who were censored. They all believed something needed to be done, and they didn’t compromise. People who like to conform do not become documentary filmmakers!

All of these filmmakers did exactly the opposite of what they were asked to do, and this is why we remember and respect them, and why we become filmmakers in this field. It's because they did not accept things. The entire festival is a statement of complexity, interconnectivity and of this perpetually complex artform that is all about disagreement and non-conformity.  To me, Sara Gómez is very clear proof of this. I felt she could somehow be the beginning of this extended family, this genealogy of documentary film. Historically, she came much later than the beginning, but within our program, she is the beginning of this story we’re trying to relate.

Rachel Pronger is a writer, curator and editor based in Berlin. She is also co-founder of the archive activist feminist collective Invisible Women. You can find her work at www.rachelpronger.com.