Cuban Film

Item

Title / Título (Original)

Cuban Film

Description / Descripción

This course examines contemporary Cuban cultural production with special emphasis on the audiovisual as a powerful medium for learning about language and culture. The class will explore topics spanning the postrevolutionary period to the present that relate to issues of gender, race, class, civil society, politics, migration, memory, trauma, diaspora, and identity. We will seek to understand contemporary Cuba by analyzing critically different film genres: short and feature length films, documentaries and web series. The audiovisual genre functions as an important source for building communication skills because it captures authentic language, llustrates language varieties and will allow students to evaluate changes in social and political representation of the island in the 21st century. We will discuss new modes of production and distribution and investigate the changing structural, technological, and material conditions that have sustained Cuban film and media. An engaging and interdisciplinary list of readings, drawn from audiovisual criticism, history and film theory will facilitate and contribute to our study.