Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
A photo montage of Cubans filmed by Agnès Varda during her visit to Cuba in 1963, four years after Fidel Castro came to power. This black & white documentary explores their socialist culture and society while making use of 1500 pictures (out of 4000!) the filmmaker took while on the island.
Agnès Varda's photo-montage approach to documentary—assembling 1,500 still photographs into a fluid, essayistic portrait of post-revolutionary Cuba—is distinctively her own, anticipating later photographic-cinema experiments and bearing her unmistakable authorial stamp. The black-and-white imagery is formally inventive, using rhythm, juxtaposition, and framing to animate stills in a way that feels genuinely cinematic rather than merely illustrated. As a documentary built entirely on stills, conventional 'acting' is essentially absent, earning a low mark. The structural throughline is loosely organised rather than dramatically propulsive, and the film's close lacks a strong culminating gesture, trailing off somewhat. Its novelty and visual craft are its clear strengths.