"My contribution." Sara Gómez at the Virreina Centre de la Imatge.

This exhibition presents, for the first time in a museum, the most comprehensive revision of the Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez (Guanabacoa, 1942 - Havana, 1974), one of the main representatives of documentary filmmaking done in Cuba during the sixties and seventies of the last century.

Despite her premature death, Sara Gómez developed an exceptional trajectory in the already memorable panorama of Cuban documentary filmmaking of the sixties and seventies.

A pioneer of what would later be called "anti-ethnographic cinema," as an exponent of a filmography based on the political power of testimony, the filmmaker investigated her time from a triple conflicting standpoint: young, a woman, and black.

All of Sara Gómez's works are inscribed within the framework of the revolutionary project that began in 1959. However, unlike other contemporaneous authors, her films can now be observed as a seismograph of the tensions that were generated in Cuban reality during the first fifteen years of the revolution's triumph.

It is in this way that one must understand Mi aporte... (1972), one of her essential films, in which she explores the spaces constructed by women in the public sphere, the workplace, and the domestic territory; on the ideologies these deploy, according to their diverse economic backgrounds and their particular systems of values, against a totalizing machismo.

Sara Gómez's cinema is particularly attentive to processes of marginalization and class antagonisms. However, faced with certain concepts used excessively by the grammars of the time, her work addresses what knowledge the most vulnerable layers deploy to challenge the uppercase History, under what circumstances individuals become complex social subjects.

Guanabacoa, crónica de mi familia (1966), De bateyes (1971), and De cierta manera (1974) compose a kind of triptych on blackness seen from divergent perspectives. Thus, the first - an autobiographical documentary - traces the filmmaker's family origins within a lineage of musicians and middle-class professionals. The second delves into the colonial wounds of racialized Cuban proletariat from the memory of numerous descendants of enslaved individuals in the sugar cane plantations of the 19th century, mostly in the hands of Catalan entrepreneurs. The last film - the first feature film made by a woman on the island - narrates the sentimental history between two characters: a white teacher who fully embraces the creeds of the revolution and a mulatto worker, born in the Las Yaguas neighborhood, who, although he has begun a process of affective and ideological change, resists dismantling the dominant masculinities in the neighborhood, at home, and at work.

Finally, there is another group of films, among which Iré a Santiago (1964) stands out, based on Federico García Lorca's poem "Son de negros en Cuba" - included in Poeta en Nueva York (1929) - and, especially, Y... tenemos sabor (1967), which analyze the African legacy in Cuban culture and recover the studies carried out by Fernando Ortiz Fernández, Argeliers León, Lydia Cabrera, and Rómulo Lachatañeré.

These documentaries not only account for some intellectual debates shared with various colleagues of the generation - such as Inés María Martiatu, Sergio Vitier, Nancy Morejón, Rogelio Martínez Furé, Jacinto Abraham Rodríguez, or Miguel Barnet Lanza - around the capitals that the popular classes and black subjects erect around themselves and the living conditions that challenge them, but also delve into how music and dance, along with other festive manifestations, break into the collective space and create unexpected and unappropriable politicizations.

It can be visited free of charge from Tuesday to Sunday and holidays from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.