Santiago Álvarez

This film memorializes the leader of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, on the occasion of his death. It narrates the story of a life which is also the story of a nation-recounting his important accomplishments in the struggle against colonialism and imperialism.

Using morgue photos, newsreel footage, and a recording by Lena Horne, Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez fired off 'Now!', one of the most powerful bursts of propaganda rendered in the 1960s.

An educational documentary film about planting and harvesting tomatoes.

The 1960 Havana Carnival is presented in a romantic story.

This is a montage of different images from the JFK, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy triumphs and assassinations, all three events being observed by Lyndon Johnson as the dark figure who is plotting the anti-black rights movement.

A ship of athletes training on the rough seas becomes a symbol of Castro’s Cuba, the games projected on the backdrop of political struggle. This is the story of a ship and of a sports delegation whom the enemy tried to stop from participating in the Tenth Central American and Caribbean Games.

CICLÓN is a coverage of hurricane Flora's sweeping the Cuban provinces of Camagüey and Oriente in October 1963: the damage, the evacuation of the villages, and the aid to victims.

Created within forty-eight hours of Che Guevara’s death, Hasta la Victoria Siempre is a Cuban documentary tribute that combines archival footage, speeches, and images of revolutionary struggle to commemorate Guevara and reaffirm the ideals of the Cuban Revolution.

This film confronts the failures of the Cuban economy, although it is made in a Guevara-like spirit of moral exhortation rather than criticism.

The New Tango (El Nuevo Tango) was not shown in Argentina for a long time as it deals with the ascent of Argentinean president Hector Campora in May 1973, and features Cuban and Chilean presidents, Osvaldo Dorticos and Salvador Allende. A million people gathered on the Plaza de Mayo to acclaim the new President. One of Cámpora's first presidential actions was a granting of amnesty to political prisoners who where jailed during the dictatorship. On 28 May Argentina restored diplomatic relations with Cuba, which then received Argentine aid - such as food and industrial products - to break the United States embargo against Cuba.

Produced by ICAIC in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, "Muerte al invasor" chronicles the three days of fighting at Playa Girón, portraying the rapid mobilization of Cuban forces and civilians against a CIA-backed exile army.

An ordinary man goes to work in a rich household of Peru and has a dream in which he sees his boss and himself appearing as equal in front of the Archangel before going to heaven... Based on a tale by Jose Maria Argueda

Follows the Cuban leader into the home of a 93 year old acquaintance of Jose Marti, who is now blind and who takes the duration of the film to realize who his illustrious interviewer actually is.

Alvarez' longest documentary examination of the Cuban Revolution, this contains exceptional interviews with Fidel, Raúl, Almeida, Vilma, Haydee, Celia and Faustino Perez, among other key players in the Revolution.

A chronicle of Fidel Castro's two-month tour of ten East European and African nations in mid-1972.

Focuses on the history of foreign intervention in Laos, first by France and then by the United States. It shows how the liberation forces of Laos, under continuous U.S. bombing, were able to run an entire society in hidden caves and tunnels. Through the leadership of the Pathet Lao, they organized schools, cultural activities, clinics, as well as political and military activities literally underground.

In December 1967, a Cuban film crew led by Santiago Alvarez, the veteran polemicist, travelled to Hanoi. They shot the footage which constitutes this short documentary all in one day - Tuesday 13. The film is the story of that day and what happened to the North Vietnamese people in the course of it.

Political propaganda film made during the Spanish Civil War.

An obituary for Victor Jara, the Chilean folksinger who was murdered in a football stadium by the military junta during the days of the September 1973 coup.

Short documentary on the solidarity of the Cuban people with Vietnam during the war against the United States.

A tribute to Santiago Álvarez, a great innovator in the language of Cuban newsreel images, presented by the ICAIC over the course of thirty years. This unique figure in Latin American cinema is reconstructed. Told as a game of Chinese boxes (documentaries within documentaries, authors within authors, images within images), Álvarez's obsession is revealed to be identical to that of his disciples: to confront the reality of Cuba with other realities, staging aesthetic operations that are nevertheless political operations, always in favor of the Revolution.

The short film El primer delegado (The First Delegate), made by a group of ICAIC directors, recounts the moments in which José Martí announced the foundations and statutes of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, the tireless struggle that the hero sustained throughout his life to obtain independence, his gifts as a political organizer, the final founding of the party, of which he was the first delegate, and his offer to General Máximo Gómez of the military leadership of the insurrection, the final founding of the party, of which he was the first delegate, and his offer to General Máximo Gómez of the military leadership of the insurrection, all narrated live by an announcer who entertains with his reading the work of the cigar makers in a tobacco factory, until the documentary reaches its final climax: the symbolic reconversion of the old Marti's party into a new one.