National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban Cinema tours early
21st-century Cuban cinema through four key figures--the
monster, the child, the historic icon, and the recluse--in order to
offer a new perspective on the relationship between the Revolution,
culture, and national identity in contemporary Cuba. Exploring films
chosen to convey a recent diversification of subject matters, genres,
and approaches, it depicts a changing industrial landscape in which the
national film institute (ICAIC) coexists with international co-producers
and small, 'independent' production companies. By tracing the
reappearance, reconfiguration, and recycling of national identity in
recent fiction feature films, the book demonstrates that the spectre of
the national haunts Cuban cinema in ways that reflect intensified
transnational flows of people, capital, and culture. Moreover, it shows
that the creative manifestations of this spectre screen--both hiding and
revealing--a persistent anxiety around Cubanness even as national
identity is transformed by connections to the outside world.