When Andy Garcia notes, "We struggled for 16 years to get to pre-production" on his new film "The Lost City," it's not the beginning of a tale of rancor, but rather deep satisfaction that the film -- an elegiac portrait of Cuba struggling to throw off the yoke of dictator Bautista only to find itself under the yoke of dictator Castro -- now exists.
Nominated for four Imagen awards, Garcia's passion project counters what he calls the "misinformation" about Castro and the Cuban revolution.
Garcia fled Cuba with his family when he was only 5 years old and, like most of the other hundreds of thousands of Cuban exiles in America, sees Cuba's decades under communist rule as "a tragic situation."
"We showed the film to 1,800 people at the Miami Film Fest, and we had to show the film something like five or six times in Telluride," says Garcia. While no fan of film piracy, he can't help describing with glee that "the film has shown up in Cuba, and people are watching it privately in their households, the same way they have to access banned authors like Faulkner."
With the DVD release hitting stores at the same time Fidel approaches his 80th birthday from a hospital bed, Garcia says a recent conversation with one of the film's biggest fans took on new meaning.
While at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, Garcia spent time with noted Castro critic, acclaimed author and former Czech President Vaclav Havel. "Havel led the Czechs' 'Velvet Revolution,' " Garcia notes, "and he is hopeful that Cuba can make this transition in a similarly peaceful way. But once a country has lived for so long under totalitarian rule, there is tremendous delicacy to the transition.
"Hopefully," Garcia says softly, "this will happen in the near future."
Contact Steven Gaydos at
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