Pastor Vega Torres

Cuban filmmaker. Director of documentaries and fiction films. Film and theater director, screenwriter.

In 1958 he was a founding member of the academy directed by Vicente Revuelta and Raquel Revuelta. In mid-1960 he successfully completed the course and participated with the Teatro Estudio group in the staging of Mundo de Cristal, Tupac Amaru, and Madre Coraje.

He acted in the film La Decisión by José Massip in 1961, and that same year he joined ICAIC as an assistant director. In 1964, after working as an actor and assistant director in several documentary films and feature films, he began his career as a documentary director.

In 1972 he filmed the documentary feature ¡Viva la República!, which today constitutes a compendium of representative images from the Island's first republican period prior to the Revolution. The film is an essay that reflects on the political and social processes that took place in Cuba during this era.

He founded the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in 1979, which he went on to direct for its first twelve editions. He was also a founder of the International School of Film and Television in 1986. From 1978 to 1987 he served as Director of International Relations at ICAIC.

In 1979 he filmed the fiction feature Retrato de Teresa, which received singular acclaim from audiences and critics, as it provoked conflicting opinions regarding the condition of working women in Cuban society. The film constitutes a diatribe against machismo and the traditional conception of female roles in daily life on the Island. Teresa is a young woman, mother of two children and textile worker, who becomes a labor activist. Although the plot appears seemingly drawn from a formula about new directions in a society that promotes women's emancipation, Pastor Vega, based on the screenplay by Ambrosio Fornet, develops a film with nuance. The characters, splendidly portrayed by actors Daisy Granados and Adolfo Llauradó, have contradictory feelings toward tradition, prejudices, and public and private duties assigned according to gender.

In 1984 he filmed Habanera, once again with his wife Daysi Granados in the leading role. Subsequently, he continued developing the theme of women with Las profecías de Amanda, a film whose subject is the life of a woman with psychic powers. This film, based on the true story of a fortune teller, proposes a relativization of scientific and enlightened patterns in the understanding of a universe—the Cuban one—widely traversed by religiosity and the marvelous.

Between 2001 and 2003, the filmmaker directed the theatrical works: La noche de los asesinos by José Triana; Solamente una vez, Juegos de odio, and Diatriba de amor contra un hombre sentado by Gabriel García Márquez.

Married to Daysi Granados, from which marriage three sons were born.

Pastor Vega passed away on June 2, 2005, victim of cancer.

Filmography

La Guerra (1961) - Documentary
Alicia en los países maravillosos (1962) - Documentary
Oportunidades (1963) - Documentary
Hombres del cañaveral (1965) - Documentary
En la noche (1965) - Fiction
La familia de un hombre (1966) - Documentary
Los mejores (1966) - Documentary
La canción del turista (1967) - Documentary
De la guerra americana (1969) - Fiction
¡Viva la República! (1972) - Documentary
La Quinta Frontera (1974) - Documentary
No somos turistas (1974) - Documentary
Retrato de Teresa (1979) - Fiction
Habanera (1984) - Fiction
Amor en campo minado (1987) - Fiction
En el aire (1989) - Fiction
Vidas paralelas (1993) - Fiction
Entrevista con el asesino (1994) - Fiction
Las profecías de Amanda (1999) - Fiction
Juegos de odio (2002) - Fiction