Week 8/2025

EN

Pelicula de largometraje sobre algunos personajes reales y otros de ficción

Feature film about real people and some fictitious ones

Opening credits1

“De cierta manera achieves a special power. Sometimes it is obviously documentary, and at other moments it is obviously fiction, but there are times when you don't know. Perhaps this is its greatest strength and its greatest charm. Sara used cinema to raise questions for herself – to investigate reality – but she was also interested in creating answers to these questions through the process of making a film. This is what she did in De cierta manera. From the direct testimony to the fiction, she allowed us to understand things that are much deeper than mere appearances reveal.”

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968) who supervised the completion of the film after Sara Gómez’s premature death at the age of thirty-one2

“De cierta manera seems a bit careless, a little awkward, almost as if it had been let loose on its own, but it also succeeds in penetrating our reality to an uncommon degree, producing an impact which is somehow charged with poetry. I think that it is there above all that our reality is shaped. I see this film as a kind of model; I think it is quite extraordinary.”

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea3

“Sara Gómez provocatively combines fiction sequences with documentary footage, and her playful use of form is both startling and purposeful. The film begins abruptly, as if in midscene, with a documentarylike record of a workers’ meeting; the credits are followed by an actual documentary segment on housing development in the early 60s, complete with didactic voice-over. Sections that seem to be dramatic are later revealed to be documentary, while other apparently dramatic scenes are interrupted by discursive sequences. The film’s form questions itself, as do the characters.”

Fred Camper4

“A work of formal radicality and political wisdom, De cierta manera moves far beyond the couple’s immediate surroundings, as Sara Gómez’s restless curiosity expands outward in all directions at once, leaving fiction behind to embrace the essay and the documentary and taking real people along for the ride: Afro-Cuban traditions, post-Revolution social policy, the biography of a boxer turned musician, urban development, the shadow cast by colonialism, the roots of machismo. Story and context are insufficient concepts anyway when they’re as hopelessly intertwined as here: the love between two people born out of a remarkable director’s expression of love for Cuba, community, and cinema itself, ambivalent, hopeful, assured.”

James Lattimer5

• 1The credits list names separately under the headings ‘actors’ (actores) and ‘real people’ (personajes reales).
• 2Cited in Susan Fanshel, “De cierta manera,” A Decade of Cuban Documentary Film 1972-1982 (New York: Young Filmmakers Foundation), 33.
• 3Julianne Burton, “Individual fulfillment and collective achievement: An interview with Tomas Gutierrez Alea,” Cineaste, 8 (1), 1977, 10 & 14.
• 4Fred Camper, “Critic’s Choice: One Way or Another,” Chicago Reader, 10 March 2000.
• 5James Lattimer, “Historiography - Remeasuring the revolution: De cierta manera,” Viennale, October 2021.

EN

“The story I developed with Marcos brings the narrative to its bloody end, but the film, like all cinema I love, goes far beyond the story it is telling. What fascinated me as a director was the possibility of inventing a different reality, far from all polite limits, in camera movements, strident sound, art collages, set decoration, costumes, subversive makeup, penetrating music, burlesque acting, in the red of blood, in the gold of sequins.

I invented my direction on the film set, rehearsing the camera movements, and chasing the actors with my Super8, for José Medeiros to translate the movements on his unlocked 35mm camera. That was the spirit; it was my spirit, the spirit of the crew, and the spirit of the cast. One of unlocked creative freedom, rebellious, marginal, and happy. And the spirit remains, to be transmitted to those who watch the film now.”

Antonio Carlos da Fontoura1

“In A Rainha Diaba, Brazilian history is not told from the official point of view, but from that of the common people. One could argue that it is also an attempt to find a queer history buried in the depths of heteronormativity. The film’s climax is a party in which Diaba receives her friends. The party is not only visually splendorous, but an allegory of queer affection – when the house is closed for clients and only Diaba’s guests are allowed in, it seems a rare moment wherein a queer world is the norm and queer affection is what is most desired.”

Mateus Nagime2

“If capoeira, which the real Madame Satã had so brilliantly mastered, is a blending of combat and dance, the violence of the gangsters in A Rainha Diaba blends with an aesthetic visual regime that never denies its social and political function. Colour here becomes the medium of a queering of the gangster genre. Especially in the first part of the film, the genre-driven narrative is overlayed by colours, laughter, suggestive glances – and thereby rendered absurd. [...]

Alongside the queering of the genre and the resistance this gives rise to, a third way in which queerness and violence come together or collide here is ecstasy. Especially at the end, in a crazy torture scene, the separation between violence and pleasure is transgressed in a mad scream before the film ends where it began: in the antechamber to hell, where the bodies – all bodies – are disposed of in a big pile. As if all along they had only been agents of an intoxicating carnival of colours, now over. As if, when all the power struggles are over, it is only the intoxication of death that triumphs, and even the devil cannot escape.”

Philipp Stadelmaier3

• 1Antonio Carlos da Fontoura, “Rebellious, Marginal, and Happy. On inventing a blood-and-sequin gay-pop film”.
• 2Mateus Nagime, “A Rainha Diaba,” Senses of Cinema, November 2023.
• 3Philipp Stadelmaier, “Queer as Hell”.

EN

“[In] this project, my creative intent was to disturb the perceptual schema of a dualistic world dividing fact from fiction, men from women, objective from subjective, mental from physical, candidness from masquerade, and tragedy from comedy. Of course the subjects I took up were gay life and the student movement – since it was made around the same time as For My Crushed Right Eye, the material is probably similar. But in terms of form, I dismantled the sequential, chronological narrative structure and arranged past and present, reality and fantasy on temporal axes as in a cubist painting, adopting a fragmented, collage-like form that quoted from literature, theater, painting, and music old and new from both East and West.

While I was not clearly conscious of it at the time, this effort connects with the concept of the postmodern that appeared later. In a sense, this kind of rejection of the ordered and arranged world of the dualistic law of perspective I am talking about is a way to start bringing modernity into question. Moving in that direction, the modern in my case breaks down on one level of the fiction at the point it is fully analyzed. More than criticizing the modern on the basis of the premodern, the concept in Funeral of Roses was to advance and rupture it by investigating it thoroughly.”

Toshio Matsumoto1

• 1Aaron Gerow, “Documentarists of Japan, No. 9: Matsumoto Toshio,” Documentary Box 9 (1996): 6-13.