• FOUR Cuban directors from different generations are currently filming or have their films in different stages of post-production. Two of them are among the most renowned directors on the island - Fernando Pérez and Daniel Díaz Torres – and the other two have been acclaimed since their beginnings - Juan Carlos Cremata and Esteban Insausti.

Héctor Quintero is an actor and theater director who always brings in a full house. His two best known productions are Contigo, pan y cebolla and El premio flaco.

He is once again in the news on account of El premio flaco (The Lightweight Prize) because the eminent director Juan Carlos Cremata is making it into a film starring Rosa Vasconcelos as Iluminada and Carlos Gonzalvo as Octavio and a supporting cast that includes Paula Alí, Omar Franco, Yerlín Pérez, Sandy Marquetti, Blanca Rosa Blanco, Luis Alberto García, Alina Rodríguez and Osvaldo Doimeadios.

Cremata has described this film as a sad comedy. Situated by Héctor Quintero in the year 1958, the central character, Iluminada, who lives in a very poor neighborhood and whose economic situation is precarious, suddenly sees her luck change when she finds a prize inside a Rina brand bar of soap and wins a new home.

With this story line, Cremata, and the author, aspire to make the audience laugh at what should, in reality, make us cry; it’s something very intrinsic to this story, a very human, and also very Cuban, conduct. The film director has stated that, in Cuba, "we laugh a lot unfortunate things and we can also die laughing. And this plot is also one of the few known comedies that does not exactly have a happy ending."

It is also interesting to note that although Juan Carlos Cremata uses the theatrical work as a starting point for his new film, the playwright did not participate in the project. The only thing that he did was to give the authorization for his work to be used.

According to Quintero, he was happy with that because it represents creative freedom and because, in the world of cinema, the director is the lord and master of decisions. El premio flaco was recorded in DVD format and is being produced by ICAIC. On the credits, Iraida Malberti is listed as co-director, Oscar Valdés as director of photography, Amaury Ramírez Malberti as original music director, Guatemalan Giacomo Buonofina is in charge of the soundtrack, and the wardrobe is by Vladimir Correa.

If Juan Carlos Cremata directs El Premio flaco like his previous films – Nada and Viva Cuba – it will doubtless be an interesting, successful, and quality film.

Hollywood has represented its version of the October Crisis, which it calls "the missile crisis," on several occasions, the last being the film 13 Days, directed by Roger Donaldson, produced by Kevin Costner, who played a central role and also launched the movie in Havana. However, the real question is: why is the Cuban experience of those moments in 1962 still unknown? This is the question proposed by director Daniel Díaz Torres with Lisanka, who also hastened to add that the film is only a love story.

According to the synopsis, the plot of the new film unfolds in the early 1970s in Veredas, an imaginary town in Cuba where Soviet rockets are positioned. Two young men, Sergio and Aurelio, fight to win the most beautiful girl in the area, Lisanka. The October Crisis is about to begin and a group of Soviet soldiers arrive in the town, among them Volodia, who becomes a dangerous rival for Sergio and Aurelio. The daily life of the town and Lisanka are irremediably changed.

The film is co-produced by ICAIC and the Russian Mosfilme and the screenplay was written by Díaz Torres himself and Eduardo del Llano. The principal characters in the film are acted by Carlos Enrique Almirante as Sergio, Rafael Ernesto Hernández as Aurelio and Mirielys Cejas as Lisanka. Other members of the cast include Blanca Rosa Blanco, Enrique Molina, Jorge Ali, and Russians Kirill Zolygin and Vladislav Vetrov

Daniel Díaz Torres has produced other films, including Alicia en el pueblo de las maravillas, Quiéreme y verás, Kleines Tropicana, Hacerse el sueco and Camino al Edén.

Speaking about Lisanka, the director said that he used the historic moment of the October Crisis to narrate a much more ordinary and entertaining story of human nature.

Loneliness, distance, and emigration are the unmistakable artists in Larga distancia (Long Distance), a full length feature by Esteban Insausti, who recently finished filming it in Havana.

According to the young director, the movie has an ensemble cast, which means that all the characters have a significant role in the film. It’s an elliptical movie divided into four histories with four cardinal points. Through his screenplay, Insausti tells the story from the point of view of loneliness.

Alejandro Pérez Gómez is Larga distancia’s director of photography and the screenplay was written by the director himself. The ensemble cast includes Verónica Lynn, Coralia Veloz, Alexis Díaz de Villegas and Zulema Clares Hernández.

Esteban Insausti’s first fiction film was Tres veces dos, which he co-directed with Pavel Giroud and Lester Hamlet. He was the director of Luz roja, the third story in the film. He wrote Larga distancia in 1998 when he was still studying at the Higher Institute of Arts and he was able to film this current movie thanks to an initiative by the Culture Ministry for budget films on video.

Insausti once again penetrates the world of individual inner solitude, a subject matter that he has already broached in his documentary Existen. Initially the film was titled Cuatro hechizos (Four Spells), but Insausti explained that he decided to rename it Larga distancia due to various changes in the original screenplay. He said that the principal difference between the old and current version is much more tragic and is related to the personal distance that each person has to cover to make their dream come true.

Film director Fernando Pérez is finishing Martí, el ojo del canario, Martí: the Eye of the Canarian), a film that he describes as taking an intimate and conspiratorial look at the infancy and adolescence of José Martí, the Cuban national hero. He has been working on the film for two years.

This movie arose from a project by Televisión Española and producer Wanda Vision and forms part of the series Libertadores, to which each Latin American country is to contribute a film about a national hero.

The director of films such as Clandestinos, Madagascar, La vida es silbar and Suite Habana, Pérez hopes to edit the new film down to around two hours and said that it attempts to cover "a decisive period (from 7-19 years of age) for the character formation and personality of an exceptional man."

Fernando Pérez affirmed that he is trying to "present a living character, extrapolating our daily life in a way with which young people today can identify and feel a profound connection."