The Sugar Curtain

In this revealing autobiographical portrait, the filmmaker, who was born in Santiago de Chile in 1971 but after the 1973 coup moved with her family to Cuba, returns to Havana to reflect on her childhood and adolescence during the “golden years” of the Cuban Revolution. Growing up during the Seventies and Eighties, she recalls, Cuba seemed like a paradise, where the state provided everything-education, healthcare, housing, work-and she was part of an idealistic generation of young “Pioneers” enthusiastically dedicated to building a new society. Camila left Cuba in 1990, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union-which for decades had assured the island nation’s economic survival-and the beginning of the “Special Period,” which by the mid-Nineties saw the Cuban economy in ruins.In THE SUGAR CURTAIN, Camila revisits her elementary school, favorite gathering places and other sites of her childhood, and reminiscences about that period with former classmates, who also discuss their life in Cuba today, when they have had to adapt to food rationing and many other social and personal privations. In Cuba today, many have to take extra or illegal jobs in order to survive.
(English Subtitles)