Eclipse Series 50: Sara Gomez’s Revolutionary Cuba

A true cinematic revolutionary who used the camera as her tool in the fight against oppression in all forms, the Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez brought the stories of ordinary Cubans to the screen with a bracing immediacy and insight. Drawing on her background in ethnography, Gómez became her country’s first woman director, exploring issues of class, race, labor, women’s health, and Afro-Cuban culture in a string of intimate, illuminating shorts that reveal the complex realities of life in a postrevolutionary society rocked by seismic change. Though she directed only one feature—the formally innovative landmark of radical feminist cinema One Way or Another—before her death from an asthma attack at age thirty-one, Gómez left behind a vital legacy as a pioneer whose inquisitive work continues to offer lessons in what an engaged anticolonial cinema can be.