In this long-awaited release, Fernando Pérez focuses his melancholy vision on lives of quiet desperation. This is not the sunny Havana of baseball, revolution, and cha-cha-cha. It is a shadowy metropolis of ordinary people trying to fulfill their dreams in a place where everything comes hard. In a daring departure from conventionality, there is no dialogue, no narration, no explanation; studded with bits of audiovisual poetry, Suite Habana reaffirms the belief that great cinema is about showing rather than telling. The subjects are identified only by first name and age, as if one were characterized by the number of years one has spent trudging through time. They include a ten-year-old boy with Down syndrome, a 30-year-old man who puts on a dress and lip-syncs to records at a nightclub, a doctor who freelances as a clown for children's parties, a construction worker who dances ballet, an elderly woman who hawks peanuts to make ends meet. Mysteriously, people take turns keeping a vigil over a public statue of John Lennon. Ships glide in and out of the harbor. Suite Habana resonates with the poignancy of everyday existence and the quiet joy of small satisfactions as few films ever have.