A su propio ritmo (At Its Own Rhythm)

This film/video installation is a personal and poetic interpretation of the historical and audiovisual richness of the Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano (ICAIC Latin American Newsreel), a weekly that documented the rapid changes in Cuban society spearheaded by the Revolutionary regime established in 1959.

Under the direction of Santiago Álvarez, a group of mostly self-taught filmmakers and technicians working under difficult conditions, reinvented the newsreel form while documenting the revolutionary struggles of Cuba and other so-called ‘Third World’ nations. The avant-garde visual aesthetics and the ideas about the political role of documentary filmmaking in society championed by its director Santiago Álvarez, had a strong impact in the reshaping the iconography of revolutionary movements all over the world during the 1960s and 1970s.

On July, 1990, the newsreel came to an end as production became almost impossible as the Cuban economy tanked as it lost vital support from the crumbling Soviet empire. For years, poor storage conditions threatened the films with permanent loss. In 2009, and after an international effort orchestrated by the Cinematheque of Cuba, the original negatives of the 1,490 editions of the newsreel were incorporated into UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.