The 18th annual edition of The Museum of Modern Art’s International Festival of Film Preservation, To Save and Project, returns this year with in-person screenings of more than sixty newly-preserved features and shorts from over nineteen countries, including two from Latin America and the Caribbean.
The festival opens tomorrow, Thursday, January 13 in New York City with a lineup of major rediscoveries and notable restorations, many enjoying world or North American premieres and presented in original versions not seen since their initial theatrical releases. Among a program of breathtakingly reinvigorated features from the last century, To Save and Project will present the North American premiere of the newly-restored landmark of Cuban and feminist cinema, De cierta manera / One way or another (1977) by Sara Gómez, alongside the much-anticipated world premiere restoration of Swiss director Walter Saxer’s long-forgotten documentary about an open-air prison in the Amazon, Sepa, Nuestro Señor de los Milagros (1987), cowritten by the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa.
Written and directed by Sara Gómez, De cierta manera was the first feature from Cuba directed by a woman —and, sadly, it was also her last. Gómez, who got her start making short documentaries and assisting Agnès Varda and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Memories of Underdevelopment), died while editing the film, leaving Alea and cowriter Tomás González Pérez to complete it. She shot the film with a handheld 16mm camera during the so-called quinquenio gris (Five Gray Years), the period in which the Cuban regime’s Sovietization of the economy radically transformed all aspects of society: jobs, housing, health, education, the place of women, and artistic censorship. Gómez brings a neorealist, even ethnographic sensibility to this love story of a middle-school teacher and a factory worker on the outskirts of Havana. Bravely unflinching in her depictions of race, class, and gender inequality, she reveals a country attempting to wrest itself from its colonialist past while hurtling into an uncertain future.
The new 2k digital restoration of the film was done by Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst in collaboration with Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), and will be playing on Friday, January 14 and Saturday, January 22 at MoMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater.
Sepa, Nuestro Señor de los Milagros by Walter Saxer
Directed by Walter Saxer and narrated by Saxer and Mario Vargas Llosa—one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists and one of the leading writers of his generation—Sepa, Nuestro Señor de los Milagros had been languishing in obscurity for more than thirty years until it was recently re-discovered and fastidiously restored by the Cinémathèque suisse and Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with the Ministerio de Cultura del Peru at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, from the 16mm original negative camera and sound held at Yacumama Films. A unique documentary record of a bold and troubling experiment in criminal justice and a powerful collaboration between Saxer, the producer of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, and the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Sepa, Nuestra Señor de los milagros observes an open-air penal colony of the same name, created in 1951 by the Peruvian government in the Amazonian jungle. Tasked with growing crops on these colonized lands, the inmates were permitted to roam freely, commune with their families, and dance and cook together, yet they soon found themselves in despair, abandoned and forgotten by their country and the world at large.
Sepa, Nuestra Señor de los milagros will be playing on Tuesday, February 1 and Wednesday, February 2 at MoMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater.
For more information on these screenings and the rest of the restorations playing as part of MoMA’s 18th edition of To Save and Project, please visit moma.org.
