TANIA DELGADO was, until last year, vice president of ICAIC, the Cuban film Institute, and she is justifiably proud of its history. Founded on March 24 1959, in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, it was the first cultural organisation created in the new state, demonstrating the high esteem in which the medium of cinema was held by the new regime. Before then cinema had been a marginal activity on the island, but “after ‘59,” she says, “came the boom!” 

The festival Screen Cuba has been designed to give the UK audience a taste of the whole period with classics from the 1960s by the recognised masters of early Cuban film-making, the so-called “Third Cinema,” Tomas Alea and Sarah Gomez, featuring alongside contemporary films that extend the remarkable tradition of socialist cinema, films that extend the work of the revolution through social critique.

Tomas Alea’s interrogation of “machismo,” the film Hasta Un Cierto Punto, famously played to one third of the island’s entire population in 1983, and the recent animation Supergal (2022), written by Ernesto Pina and Hugo Rivalta, extends that process in a playful way, telling the story of a female Chemistry teacher whose superpower is the capacity to transform violent men by clarifying their thoughts.