Octavio Cortázar Jiménez

Filmmaker, director, documentarian.

His beginnings in audiovisual media are recorded in television where he first worked as a director and later as head of production for cultural programs at CMBF-TV, channel 7. Previously he had studied at the School for radio and television in 1958, and had worked as a writer of advertising copy from 1956 to 1958.

Following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959, he became part of the newly founded Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), where he participated as assistant director in a large number of shorts and documentaries. Also during those years he was involved in the filming of Historias de la Revolución, the first film of the nascent ICAIC.

In 1963 he enrolled in the Film Faculty of Charles University in Prague (FAMU) where he studied in the directing specialty. In 1967, shortly after arriving from Czechoslovakia, he embarked on the filming of his debut work, Por primera vez.

Awarded at the Leipzig Festival that same year, this documentary contains many of the guidelines that would later characterize the cinematographic work of Octavio Cortázar, who later acknowledged in an interview that Por primera vez was his template. The work constitutes a testimony of the reality of Cuba, underdeveloped, in the process of being transformed by social revolution, and within this context presents the relationship that was established between the people and culture. The predominant tone in his work, said Cortázar, was to make humanist, anthropological and fundamentally ideological cinema.

The material documents the experience of an audience of peasants in the hamlet "Los Mulos" discovering cinema with Modern Times by Charles Chaplin on April 16, 1967. In just 10 minutes of duration, first the sequences of film interviews with ICAIC mobile cinema operators are shown alongside dialogues with children and adults from the Baracoa region, deep in the mountains, where each person said what could perhaps be a film; and it culminates with shots of the astonished faces of those seeing cinema for the first time. The documentary, considered one of the classic works of Cuban cinema, was included by Warner Home Video in 2003 in the DVD titled Chaplin.

To this will be added a long list of documentaries among which can be mentioned About a character some call Saint Lazarus and others call Babalú (1968), an analysis of religious syncretism; or Speaking of the Cuban punto (1972). Although in 1977 Cortázar is promoted to the category of fiction director, his work as a documentarian does not end there and can also be cited Young at Heart (1983), portrait of a curious Santiago character, Emilio Benavides Puente, known as the "Red Devil"; An eternal sower (1988) about a Japanese man who emigrated to Cuba at the end of the First World War; and UFOs in Cuba? 50 years of mystery (1996), among many others.

Documentary is the most direct way to capture life and its significance, and it teaches us to search from a distance, affirmed Octavio Cortázar in an interview. Hence the filmmaker considered it the antechamber of fiction cinema, since it sharpened the artist's eye to understand the reality surrounding him and bring it to celluloid. The previous criteria, permeated with ideas about cinema championed by Italian neorealism and embraced by the New Latin American Cinema movement, later became evident in the feature films directed by Cortázar.

The author's first feature film maintained a completely sold-out theater for eight consecutive weeks and was extraordinarily well received by film critics at the time. The film The Brigadist (1977) –the story of Mario, a young member of the brigades that undertook the Literacy Campaign in the early Cuban Revolution, sent to the Zapata Swamp– was conceived as a tribute to that generation of "child heroes," and owes much to the shorts that, in late 1960, Cortázar made in the Popular Encyclopedia project, a sort of didactic educational department in aid of the Literacy Campaign. Precisely Patricio Wood, adolescent actor who embodies the protagonist, saw Cortázar's documentaries to prepare his character.

With a screenplay by Luis Rogelio Nogueras and music by Sergio Vitier, The Brigadist is both document and fiction of an era and, according to the words of its director, "contains fifty percent history and fifty percent imagination and it was not difficult to structure because Cuban revolutionary reality is so tremendously rich that our maximum objective is to live up to that reality."

Again with the collaboration of Luis Rogelio Nogueras and Sergio Vitier, Cortázar makes Border Guards in 1980, a film with which he again documents-fictionalizes key episodes of the 1960s decade as he had done in The Brigadist. The beginning of the border guard corps in 1963 is the historical event that serves as the starting point for the screenplay, which narrates the vicissitudes of a squad of young men sent to defend a strategic point in the northern cays of Cuba and which has as its chief "Pata Pelúa," sergeant Margarito Soler, veteran of the Rebel Army, played by the excellent actor Tito Junco.

According to Cortázar, the idea arose while he was finishing The Brigadist since the story of these young border guards seemed similar to that of those child brigadists: they were from the same generation.

The screenplay for this film was based on interviews with real characters. However, unlike its predecessor with which it shares so many similarities, the film Border Guards was criticized for the predictability of the screenplay and the almost exact copy of the plot lines of The Brigadist; although it was praised for its cinematography that exploits natural settings, Cuban flora and fauna.

To the two previous films -the author's best known- must be added Right of Asylum, from 1994, an adaptation of the homonymous story by writer Alejo Carpentier. The story of Felipe, a man who, as a result of a coup d'état, seeks political asylum in the embassy of a neighboring country, was not received with the same enthusiasm from audiences and critics that had characterized the author's other film productions.

Along with his work as a documentarian and fiction director, Octavio Cortázar also worked as a theatrical director. Among his productions are the adaptation of Border Guards (1984); the musical comedy Hello Dolly (1985); the staging Around the Text (1994), about the poetry of Pablo A. Fernández; and Porgy and Bess (2000), staging of Gershwin's opera with the Pro-Arte Lírico group.

Cortázar combined his work as a filmmaker with teaching and for many years he was the dean of the documentary film department at EICTV -of which he is a founder- and professor of directing at the Film, Radio and Television Faculty at the Higher Institute of Art.

Died suddenly on February 27, 2008, in Madrid, Octavio Cortázar left behind not only essential films and documentaries for Cuban cinematography, but also more than one generation of grateful filmmakers.