Sara Gómez

Gómez was a revolutionary filmmaker, concerned with representing the Afro-Cuban community, women's issues, and the treatment of the marginalized sectors of society. Her work highlighted inequalities of social class, as well as racial and gender discrimination. She used the lens of her camera and ethnographic knowledge to narrate histories about everyday lives in revolutionary Cuba. Gómez filmmaking identifies the problems of colonialism, specifically experienced by previously marginalized communities (black people, women, poor, religious, and young people) who were unaware of the possibilities of a better future. "Exposing the roots of the world that had to be left behind and demanding the arrival of the future: her mission was to allow these communities to understand the process of what was happening in their lives, their needs, and possible departures."

Trained as a musician and ethnographer, Sara Gómez came from the folkloric Havana neighborhood of Guanabacoa – traditionally viewed as one of the epicenters of Afro-Cuban popular culture, as well as a marginal sector of Cuba that has many issues such as racism and gender inequality which was depicted later on in her films. She studied music (piano), literature, and Afro-Cuban ethnography. "Raised by her paternal grandmother and four aunts, she grew up surrounded by Afro-Cuban professionals, including family members who played in the Havana Philharmonic Orchestra, and attended dances at black recreational societies like the Porvenir and El Club Progreso (The Progressive Club), which inspired her studies at the Conservatory of Music in Havana." Gómez was not poor or uneducated. Being brought up around scholars and art that shaped the culture around her, she used her voice to represent those who do not like those seen in her work. Gómez explored journalism by writing for the youth magazine Mella and for the Communist Party newspaper Noticias de Hoy (News of Today) – before taking a position at the newly formed Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). At the ICAIC she served as assistant director to Jorge Fraga, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and Agnès Varda. She became the first female film director in Cuba. Gómez made a series of documentary shorts on assigned topics before directing her first feature-length film. Cuban directors see documentaries as an important training ground because it forces them to focus on the material reality of Cuba, consequently, emphasizing filmmaking as an expression or tool of the culture. Gómez directed multiple short documentaries which emphasized and criticized the Cuban revolutionary society. Her short films explored the positions of women and Afro-Cubans within society.

She married fellow director Hector Veitia and had daughter Iddia. In 1967 on set of Y tenemos sabor she met Germinal Hernandez. They met working together, she was the director and he was a sound technician. They started an affair and later married and had two children, Ibis and Alfredo. Sara was chronically asthmatic.

Sara Gómez's last film, the hybrid narrative/documentary De cierta manera, (translated for US audiences as One Way or Another) has been hailed as the "first movie to truly explore conflicting threads of racial and gender identity within a revolutionary context." This revolutionary film was produced by the ICAIC in 1974. This film takes place in Miraflores, a lower-class neighborhood in Havana, Cuba. This film addresses issues of class, race, and gender after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. This film shifts between a documentary style that analyzes the revolution and a fictitious love story that challenges the attitudes around race, social class and gender in Cuban culture.Sara Gomez chooses both professional actors and nonprofessional actors to represent the issues of story and in real life: the conflict between Cuba marginal population's life and the Revolution. At the beginning of the film Gomez Says it is "a film about real people, and some fictitious ones." Noted Cuban film scholar Michael Chanan observes that the film is "an aesthetically radical film...mix[ing]...fiction and documentary, in the most original way...by using real people to play themselves alongside professional actors." Haseenah Ebrahim writes about how Gómez's work brings attention to religious groups such as the Abakuá, "Afrocuban religions make an appearance in the films and videos of almost all Afrocuban filmmakers, and feature prominently in the work of Gómez..." and highlights the importance of Sara Gómez's background as a black Cuban woman in cinema by noting, "In the case of both Gómez and Rolando, race has functioned to provide a perspective that is not mirrored in the work of non-black Cuban filmmakers. Significantly, both women self-identified themselves as black Cubans: Sara Gómez has been quoted as saying she did not want to be 'just another middle-class black woman who plays the piano'". Essayist Roberto Zurbano Torres states, "it is also essential to mark her commitment to popular culture and her critical and self-critical passion through which she expressed the complexity of a world under construction: contributing a cinema of conscience, pointing out the virtues and defects of a social process that tried to change the world from an island in the Caribbean." Gómez died before the film could be completed and so Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Rigoberto Lopez, and Julio García Espinosa supervised the sound-mix and post-production stages of preparing One way or Another for theatrical release. The film was not released for a few years because of technical problems such as damaged negative that were sent to Sweden for repairing.

At the end of Agnès Varda's short documentary Salut les Cubains (1963), Sara Gómez is featured as a young filmmaker dancing Cha-cha-cha with her fellow ICAIC filmmakers (illustrated through photographic animation.) Agnès Varda describes Gómez in the documentary as one who, "directs didactic films." Throughout the production of this film, "She [Gómez] had the opportunity to accompany the prestigious gala director Agnès Varda in her tour of our country and collaborate with her in the documentary" Varda and Gomez became friends throughout the making of this film. "We got along well, and when the ICAIC told me I had to go to Santiago de Cuba, Sarita was chosen to come with me. We took a plane to Santiago together, we slept in rooms with twin beds, we talked a lot at night" (Varda).

In 2004, the Swiss filmmaker Alessandra Muller directed the documentary film: Sara Gómez: An Afro-Cuban Filmmaker (2004), supported both by ICAIC and Agnès Varda. This film which looks back on her life and revisits Gómez's family and friends. In the documentary, they describe her film sets as social events and emphasize that Sara would listen to everyone's input, of professionals and those who were not. Actor Mario Balmaseda notes "We spent a lot of time with people from this area, almost three, four months living with them sometimes sleeping and eating in their home, and this made it a lot easier. We slipped from a professional level into friendship." In the documentary, Sara Gómez is praised by her family as a woman who refused to choose between family and normal life. However, as she becomes increasingly involved in her job, her husband started to rebel against her work. In the end, she got divorced with her husband.

Gómez died while editing De cierta manera, at the age of 31, due to an asthma attack. She had chronic asthma and overall poor health due to complications while giving birth to her son.

De cierta manera (1977)

Salut les Cubains (1963) dir. Agnès Varda Cumbite (1964) dir. Tomas Gutierez Alea El Robo (1965) dir. Jorge Fraga