Cuban documentary film was never aimed only at its own nation but saw its task as providing information about the events in the so-called Third World. Well-known films by Santiago Álvarez deal with the anti-imperialist struggles in Vietnam and Laos. Starting in the late 1970s, the focus was expanded to include the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, a shift clearly reflected in the Leipzig festival programmes. Meanwhile, in 1980, Oberhausen screened, in addition to the retrospective “Cinema in Cuba 1959–1979”, Bernabé Hernández’s “La infancia de Marisol”. The film was one of the first Cuban productions made after the victory of the Nicaraguan Revolution in July 1979. It is based on the accounts of 14-year-old Marisol who describes how she joins the Sandinista Liberation Front, fights against the dictatorship, is taken prisoner and, like her father and brother, brutally tortured. The film ends with the prospect of a new life: Marisol’s studies in Cuba.

Florian Wüst