El elefante y la bicicleta (1994)

Directed by

Juan Carlos Tabío

Genre

drama film, comedy film

Country

Cuba

Runtime

1h 21m

Rating

7.0 of 10 from 5 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A former convict returns to an allegorical island in the 1920s with a silent movie projector. The community starts to see their own revolutionary struggle reflected in the film.

whimsicalplayfulthought-provokingdreamlikenostalgicquirkymetatextualpoeticslow-burn

What happens

The Elephant and the Bicycle (Spanish: El elefante y la bicicleta) is a 1994 Cuban surrealist comedy film directed by Juan Carlos Tabío, and written by Tabío and Eliseo Alberto. The film makes use of magical realism and metatextuality to create a parable of Cuban history from its first conquest through the Cuban Revolution, and pay homage to 100 years of cinema. The film stars Luis Alberto García, Liliam Vega, and Raúl Pomares, and was produced by Rafael Rey. Set in 1925 on an allegorical version of Cuba (an island called La Fe), the film follows El Isleño, an ex-con who returns to his island with a silent movie projector and a print of a version of "Robin Hood". When repeated viewings of the film reaffirm the revolutionary sentiment in the air, the film is transformed in the eyes of its audience into a drama paralleling their own struggle – one in which the underdogs rise up against the island's unpopular landowner, with the villages themselves taking part in the action. It premiered at the sixteenth Havana Film Festival in 1994, where it won two awards, and was later nominated for a Goya Award for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film in 1996. The film was co-produced internationally by ICAIC in Cuba and Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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