Enrique Pineda Barnet

Cuban film and video director and screenwriter who has worked across a wide spectrum of artistic forms (theater, dance, ballet, poetry, narrative), and has a notable pedagogical career. National Film Prize 2006.

From an early age he felt a profound inclination toward art that led him to explore diverse artistic forms. Such is the case with theater, which he joined enthusiastically in the nineteen fifties. Founder of the Cultural Society Nuestro Tiempo, he became involved with Teatro Estudio, delving into dramaturgy and directing stage productions. In those years, he starred as an actor in Lila la mariposa by Rolando Ferrer, with the Company Las máscaras, and his work El Juicio de la Quimbumbia received an honorable mention in the Casa de las Américas prize in 1960. Also interested in literature, he was a recipient of the important National Literature Prize Alfonso Hernández Catá (1953).

On the other hand, before 1959, Pineda Barnet undertook intense work in mass media, first in radio and later in television, where he took on scriptwriting and directing programs of diverse kinds, in addition to a long and acclaimed career in advertising, all of which established a solid technical foundation for his future entry into cinematography.

Following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Pineda Barnet assumed various tasks during a brief period until, in late 1962, he joined the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), where he promptly began a film career marked by diversity: documentaries, feature films and short fiction films, some characterized by their experimental nature, were his earliest proposals.

In 1964 he premiered his film Giselle, a film which, in Pineda Barnet's words, "seeks to preserve for the future the creation of Alicia Alonso and her group in Giselle." The production team, rather than assuming a static posture as an "ideal spectator" documenting one of the emblematic pieces performed by the National Ballet of Cuba, sought to coherently adapt the language of dance to the expressive possibilities of cinema, thus enriching its spirit and atmosphere.

This represents one of the filmmaker's highest tributes to a sustained relationship with this art form, which has led him to teach classes at the National Ballet of Cuba and write screenplays for works such as La dádiva, Tina, and La caza.

That same year he served as co-screenwriter for the Cuban-Soviet co-production Soy Cuba, directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. Centered on four stories intended to provide a sample of life in pre-revolutionary Cuba, it achieved extraordinary critical success in the nineties in the United States following a distribution strategy undertaken by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

Since the nineteen sixties, he has worked in documentary cinema and in early experimental exercises that allowed him to be included, along with other creators such as Santiago Álvarez Román and Nicolás Guillen Landrián, among the earliest precedents of video art on the island. In this sense, his experiment Cosmorama (1964), a kind of visual poem created in collaboration with plastic artist Sandú Darié, exhibits an original treatment of editing and soundtrack integrated with images of this master of abstraction's work.

This experimental line continued in other works such as Juventud R-2 (1968), a documentary testimony of a day of performance events, and M-S (Mejor Servicio) and El Ñame, both from 1970. These two works revealed, along with formal explorations regarding editing and soundtrack, a keen sense of humor and satire, aimed at criticizing the arbitrariness and formalism inherent in the national context.

His experience as a documentarian would be inseparable from his fiction work, making this amalgam a distinctive hallmark of his feature films, which would even help place some of his works at the very edge of genres (David, from 1967, for example). History and its protagonists would become the thematic axis of several of his film proposals. Mella (1975) recreates the revolutionary trajectory of Julio Antonio Mella, one of the most outstanding student leaders and anti-imperialist figures of the republican era.

Pineda Barnet decided, while being meticulously careful about period characterization details, to include distancing devices (conversations between the protagonist and the camera, explanatory titles), and deliberately to disregard other imperatives of historical reconstruction (age and physical resemblance of the lead actor to Mella), in pursuit of greater creative freedom and openness, whose results did not achieve the expected effectiveness in all cases.

In 1979, the lives of two outstanding revolutionary fighters, Lidia Doce and Clodomira Acosta, provided the thematic basis for his film Aquella larga noche. Structurally complex, given its reliance on reconstructive memory, it centers on the night of torture to which they were subjected before their murder, as a result of a betrayal.

He opened the eighties with Tiempo de amar (1983), a love story contextually framed during the Missile Crisis, but it was at the end of the decade that Enrique Pineda Barnet achieved his greatest success with La Bella del Alhambra (1989). Inspired by the novel Canción de Rachel by Cuban writer Miguel Barnet, it narrates the life adventures of Rachel, a chorus girl who aspires to become a star and achieves fame at the renowned Alhambra theater. Set in the twenties, the film combines elements of melodrama and musical cinema, articulating a plural homage to the tradition of vernacular theater and the rich diversity of Cuban music, sustained, furthermore, by excellent direction of actors and set design. This exploration of Cuban identity proved to be a resounding box office success, with two million spectators in two weeks, and earned the Goya Prize from the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences in 1990.

He is also a university professor, writer, journalist, critic, advertising professional, and radio broadcaster. Founder of the Cultural Society Nuestro Tiempo (1952) and Teatro Estudio, and member of the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC), the General Society of Authors of Spain (SGAE), the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC), and the National Video Movement.

As a writer, he has worked in poetry, the novel, short story, and theater, and has written texts for musical numbers. His stories and poems have been published in periodicals in Cuba, Uruguay, Brazil, Panama, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Syria, Spain, the Soviet Union, and Algeria. He was an adviser and co-screenwriter with Eugenio Evtuchenko for the Cuban-Soviet co-production Soy Cuba by Mikhail Kalatozov, filmed in 1962; co-screenwriter with Osvaldo Dragún of Crónica cubana; and adviser to Franco Solinas for the film Quemada by Gillo Pontecorvo. He worked with Glauber Rocha on the Spanish dubbing of Tierra en trance. Additionally, he is the author of screenplays and treatments for ballet and modern dance, such as Los zapaticos de rosa and Tina Modotti for Danza Nacional de Cuba, and La caza, Mariana, and El bosque for the Royal Ballet of Belgium.

Universities in Puerto Rico, Spain, the United States, and other countries in the Americas consider him a professor of important courses in directing, acting, and dramaturgy. He combines his work as a filmmaker with his role as professor at the International Film and Television School of San Antonio de los Baños. He has participated as a juror and speaker in various international film events, and has taught courses, seminars, master classes, workshops, delivered lectures, published works, and exhibited films in universities and cultural institutions in dozens of countries.

Since the nineteen nineties, Pineda Barnet has worked primarily outside of Cuba in countries such as Puerto Rico, and among his major works is the feature film Angelito mío (1998).

In 2006 he was awarded the National Film Prize, an award that honors the most outstanding figures in this field on the Island.

In 2009, with El Charentón del Buendía, he received the First Jury Mention in the Documentary category of the 22nd National Video Movement Meeting. This work illustrates the daily life of one of the main companies working in the Cuban capital.

The New York Havana Film Festival in 2010 paid tribute to the Cuban filmmaker and playwright for his life's work.

Barnet directs the creative group Taller Arca, Nariz, Alhambre, created several years ago and made up of young graduates from the Higher Institute of Art (ISA). About the group's name he has stated: "Arca, because it rescues things that nobody wants to talk about; Nariz, because it sniffs everything out; and Alhambre, because it is at the same time communicator and balance, risk." Under this label he has made important short films.

After the film Verde verde, a psychological thriller about homosexual seduction that premiered in 2010, he directed the short Upstairs (2014) and is currently working on Aplausos, which will star legendary actress Verónica Lynn.

Main Works
Giselle (Screenplay and Direction. Fiction. 90´). 1964
Soy Cuba (Co-screenwriter. Fiction. 110´). 1964
Cosmorama (Visual and sound experiment. 5´). 1964
David (Screenplay and Direction. Documentary). 1967
Juventud, rebeldía y revolución (Screenplay and Direction. Experiment, 30´) 1968
M-S (Mejor Servicio). (Screenplay and Direction. Doc. 10´) 1970
El Ñame. (Screenplay and Direction. Doc. 10´). 1970
Mella. (Screenplay and Direction. Fiction. 110´). 1975
Aquella larga noche. (Co-screenwriter and Direction. Fiction. 110´) 1979
La Bella del Alhambra. (Co-screenwriter and Direction. Fiction. 108´) 1989
El camello en el ojo de la aguja. (Screenplay and Direction. Experimental Fiction, 7´) 1997
Angelito mío. (Screenplay and Direction. Fiction. 110´) 1998
Los tres juanes. (Screenplay and Direction. Fiction. 13´) 2000
El Charenton del Buendía (2008)
La Anunciación (Fiction) 2009
Verde verde (Screenplay and Direction) Feature fiction film 2010
Mi Virgen de la Caridad (Screenplay) by Enrique Pineda Barnet and Carlos Barba Salva. Official Selection of Unpublished Screenplay at the 36th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana 2014."
2014: Acting in fiction short "25 Horas" by filmmaker Carlos Barba.

Awards
National Film Prize. Havana, 2006.
Coral Award of Honor from the 38th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema for lifetime achievement, 2016.
For Giselle
One of the most significant films of the year. Annual Selection by Critics. Havana, Cuba. 1964.
Merit Diploma awarded by the Jury of the Dance Film Award Competition. Dance Films Association Inc. New York, United States. 1979.
For David
Most significant Cuban film of the year. Annual Selection by Critics. Havana, Cuba. 1967.
For La Bella del Alhambra
Coral Prize for Music to Mario Romeu. XI International Festival of New Latin American Cinema. Havana, Cuba. 1989.
Coral Prize for Set Design to Derubín Jácome. XI International Festival of New Latin American Cinema. Havana, Cuba. 1989.
Special Prize from the cultural tabloid El Caimán Barbudo to Beatriz Valdés. XI International Festival of New Latin American Cinema. Havana, Cuba. 1989.

Beatriz Valdés in La Bella del Alhambra.
Goya Prize from the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences, 1990.
Prize from Radio Havana Cuba. XI International Festival of New Latin American Cinema. Havana, Cuba. 1989.
One of the ten most significant films of the year. Annual Selection by Critics. Havana, Cuba. 1989
Caracol Prize for Direction. UNEAC Competition. Havana, Cuba. 1990.
Caracol Prize for Photography to Raúl Rodríguez. UNEAC Competition. Havana, Cuba. 1990.
Caracol Prize for Sound to Raúl García. UNEAC Competition. Havana, Cuba. 1990.
Caracol Prize for Editing to Jorge Abello. UNEAC Competition. Havana, Cuba. 1990.
Caracol Prize for Costume Design to Diana Fernández. UNEAC Competition. Havana, Cuba. 1990.
Caracol Prize for Set Design to Derubín Jácome. UNEAC Competition. Havana, Cuba. 1990.
Best Film Prize awarded by the University of Havana. 1990.
Girasol Prize for Popularity for Best Film. Revista Opina. Havana, Cuba. 1990.
Girasol Prize for Popularity for Acting to Beatriz Valdés. Revista Opina. Havana, Cuba. 1990.
Prize from the Cinematographic Cultural Complex Yara. Havana, Cuba. 1990.
Acting Prize to Beatriz Valdés. Section of Scenic Arts of UNEAC. Havana, Cuba. 1990.
Best Film and Special Mention for Best Female Performance to Beatriz Valdés. International Film Festival of Troia. Portugal. 1990.
Oscar Contender for Best Foreign Language Film, 1991.
Bronze Hand Prize at the New York Latino Festival, 1991.
Pitirre Prize at Cinemafest Festival in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1991.
El Mégano Prize from the National Federation of Film Clubs. Havana, Cuba. 1991.
Quebracho Prize (from the public). International Film Festival of Asunción. Paraguay. 1991
For El Charentón del Buendía
National Editing Prize to Ilka Valdés. 22nd National Video Movement Meeting. Havana, Cuba. June, 2009.
First Jury Mention in the Documentary category. 22nd National Video Movement Meeting. Havana, Cuba. June, 2009.
He was presented with the Coral Award of Honor from the 38th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema for lifetime achievement, 2016.

He holds the medals "Raúl Gómez García" and "Félix Elmuza," the Distinction for National Culture, and the National Film Prize 2006.