CHESTERTOWN, MD—Friday, April 10, at 2:30 p.m., Cuban cinema expert Enrique García will present a talk titled “Let’s Talk About Cuba” on the topic of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1993 film Strawberry and Chocolate. There will be a free screening of the film at 5:30 p.m. TODAY, Thursday April 9.  Both the screening and the talk will take place in Norman James Theatre, William Smith Hall, and are free and open to the public. 

Strawberry and Chocolate, or Fresa y Chocolate, the only Cuban film to be nominated for an Oscar, is a drama about the political and personal implications of life in 1979 Havana in the midst of the New Nationalist Vision. The story follows the relationship between David, a staunchly communist student and Diego, an older gay artist unhappy with Castro’s censorship of his work and his sexuality. The feelings between the two run the spectrum of attraction and repulsion before finally settling into a genuine friendship.

A review in The New York Times described the film’s “sense of luxurious romantic doom set against a candy-colored backdrop” and how an atmosphere in which ideological battles are so much a part of the characters’s lives that they almost take them for granted.

García is an assistant professor of Hispanic Visual Culture in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Middlebury College. He has researched Cuban Cinema, and transnational genres in Hispanic national cinemas. He is currently working on a book about Cuban cinema along with other scholarly works about Latino comic books and Hispanic musicals.

This program is sponsored by the William James Forum and the Department of Modern Languages.