Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás (1928-1996), was a leading Cuban filmmaker and one of the founders of modern Cuban cinema. His first feature film, Stories of the Revolution (1960), relates three separate stories of the struggle that led to the Communist revolution in Cuba in 1959. He gained international attention with Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), a satire on Cuban bureaucracy. Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) mixes pieces of documentary film with the main story. It shows the complex reality of life in Cuba through the self-doubts of an intellectual who decides to stay in Cuba after 1959 but cannot accept life in a revolutionary society. Gutiérrez Alea’s film Strawberry and Chocolate (1993) is set in Havana in 1979. The satire on sex and politics in Cuba won a special jury prize at the Berlin film festival of 1994. It also was nominated for the 1995 Academy Award for best foreign film.
Gutiérrez Alea was born in Havana on Dec. 11, 1928. He studied law at the University of Havana. From 1951 to 1953, he studied at the Center for Experimental Cinematography in Rome. After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Gutiérrez Alea joined the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, and he started to make documentary films about contemporary issues in Cuban society. Gutiérrez Alea died on April 16, 1996.
