De cierta manera

With Valentín Roma

This feature film—the first directed by a female filmmaker in Cuba—premièred three years after the death of Sara Gómez. However, although she was unable to finish it, the creator wrote precise instructions as to what the final result should be, which included an extraordinary soundtrack by her close friend, the composer Sergio Vitier.

De cierta manera (One Way or Another; 1974) is a film that pivots around multiple dichotomies: fiction versus documentary, professional actors and people who act, a white middle-class teacher versus a mulato worker, the school that redeems and the street codes that label, young emancipated women versus archaic macho beliefs, urban regeneration plans and ways of life unwilling to be brought to order, people born under the socialist model versus those labelled “marginal”.

With these ingredients, Sara Gómez Yera—as she signed the credits—made a film that concludes a significant part of her previous investigations, or at least amplifies them, through characters traversed by multiple regrets, moments of growth and setbacks.

The main plot revolves around a teacher who arrives in the Miraflores neighbourhood—a residential area built by the revolutionary government where the insalubrious shantytown of Las Yaguas used to be—and a worker born in the original settlement.

This affective story not only highlights the collision of mentalities between each protagonist, the different economic backgrounds and respective ideologies but also an additional conflict. She embodies an unwavering conviction regarding the narratives of the revolution, while he symbolises a certain resistance to new collective commitments, as well as a belligerent refusal to dismantle the machismos that dominate the neighbourhood, the home and the workplace.

Sara Gómez was a pioneer in the documentary analysis of marginalisation processes. However, at the time of making this film, fifteen years after the revolutionary triumph, debates emerged, encouraged by militant intellectual circles, which questioned the extent to which the Cuban political project had included subaltern classes in its transformations and its theory for change.