Humberto Solás
Cuba,
1968
A breathtaking vision of Cuban revolutionary history wrought with white-hot intensity, Humberto Solás’s operatic epic tells the story of a changing country through the eyes of three women, each named Lucía. In the 1890s, she is a tragic noblewoman who inadvertently betrays her country for love during the War of Independence. In the 1930s, she is the daughter of a bourgeois family drawn into the workers’ uprising against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. And in the postrevolutionary 1960s, she is a newlywed farm girl fighting the ongoing battle against patriarchal oppression. A formally dazzling landmark of postcolonial cinema, Lucía is both a sensually stunning experience and a fiercely feminist portrait of a society journeying toward liberation.