The Cinema of Sara Gómez: Reframing Revolution

Throughout the 1960s until her untimely death in 1974, Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez engaged directly and courageously with the social, political, economic, and cultural transformations promised by the Cuban Revolution.

Gómez directed numerous documentary films in 10 prolific years. She also made De cierta manera (One way or another), her only feature-length film. Her films navigate complex experiences of social class, race, and gender by reframing revolutionary citizenship, cultural memory, and political value. Not only have her inventive strategies become foundational to new Cuban cinema and feminist film culture, but they also continue to inspire media artists today who deal with issues of identity and difference. The Cinema of Sara Gómez assembles history, criticism, biography, methodology, and theory of Gómez’s work in scholarly writing; interviews with friends and collaborators; the film script of De cierta manera; and a detailed and complete filmography.

Featuring striking images, this anthology reorients how we tell Cuban cinema history and how we think about the intersections of race, gender, and revolution. By addressing Gómez’s entire body of work, The Cinema of Sara Gómez unpacks her complex life and gives weight to her groundbreaking cinema.

Susan Lord is Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University, jointly appointed to the Departments of Art and Gender Studies. She is editor (with Annette Burfoot) of Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence and (with Karen Dubinsky, Catherine Krull, Sean Mills, and Scott Rutherford) of New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness. María Caridad Cumaná is Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Arts and Philosophy at Miami Dade College. She is author (with Joel del Río) of Latitudes of the Margin: Latin American Cinema before the Third Millennium (in Spanish) and editor (with Karen Dubinsky and Xenia Beloba de la Cruz) of My Havana: The Musical City of Carlos Varela.