The first female filmmaker in Cuba, Sara Gómez (1942-1974) was, in her lifetime, also the only female director and one of very few black directors in her country. Growing up in Havana’s Guanabacoa neighborhood, she studied music, literature and Afro-Cuban ethnography. Marginalized Afro-Cuban culture imbued her film work, including her first and only feature, De cierta manera, which she had almost finished editing just before her death at thirty-one.

Dynamic, reflexive and sincere, this revolutionary hybrid—featuring actors, non-actors reenacting and documentary segments—maneuvers freely between multiple narrators, cinematic techniques and points of view in order to illustrate a complex web of relationships—between men and women, fellow workers, students and teachers, children and parents—within the shifting political and socioeconomic framework of post-revolutionary Cuba.

The two main characters, Mario and Yolanda, who come from vastly different backgrounds, set up the film’s central dichotomy. She is a progressive teacher, educated and independent; he is a factory worker who is in ways a traditional man steeped in machismo and patriarchy, but “thinks differently” than his friends, drawn to the freethinking Yolanda and the promises of the collective. Even their individual minds are often pulled in different directions as they navigate the realities within oppressed cultures and all of the vagaries of both the old ways and the new ideals. And the stories may not always add up. The filmmaker even introduces a slight warning before the historical, “factual” sections, keeping her audience alert and on guard. Like the recurrent image of a wrecking ball destroying the old slum housing, De cierta manera blasted the way for a new cinema that dared to break away from oppressive systems in both its radical, un-patriarchal form and its chorus of diverse voices—with the understanding that the path to decolonization and social equality will not be smooth or simple.