Documentary on Fernando Pérez Premieres at Gibara International Film Festival

August 5, 2022

The documentary "The Music of Life. The Cinema of Fernando Pérez and Cuban Reality", by Swiss filmmaker Beat Borter, dedicated to the life and work of the renowned Cuban director, had its world premiere at the XVI Gibara International Film Festival, in that coastal municipality of Holguín.

With screenplay and production by Delia Coto and Borter, the film approaches, as a starting point, the author of "Madagascar" from a Martian perspective, and is a collaboration between ojalá-film and ICAIC in which four collaborators close to Fernando participate: photographer Raúl Pérez Ureta and actors Laura de la Uz, Isabel Santos and Luis Alberto García.

"The Music of Life" is a beautiful and necessary approach to Fernando's life and work and at the same time to Cuba and Havana, and its inhabitants, the city where the filmmaker was born in 1944, through the presence, as one more character, of this in his cinema.

Borter, who died in June 2020, reviews the childhood, beginnings in the seventh art, Cuban daily life, in different stages, and how it permeates all of Fernando Pérez's cinematography, the documentary being a sincere tribute to the one recognized, by the public and critics, as the most important contemporary Cuban filmmaker.

With editing by Pedro Suárez and Borter, the documentary had the support of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (COSUDE), who cooperated in the digitalization of part of the work of the author of "Clandestinos" and "Madrigal" carried out by Borter.