Memories of Underdevelopment

The Cuban cinema reached full maturity with this classic study of a bourgeois writer who stays in Cuba after the revolution, despite his alienation from the new society and the loss of all his friends to Miami. Based on novelist/screenwriter Edmundo Desnoes’s autobiographical Inconsolable Memories, Memories of Underdevelopment became the first feature-length film from post-revolutionary Cuba to be released in the United States, to high acclaim. Peter Schjeldahl in the New York Times called it “a profound, noble film . . . beautifully understated, sophisticated and cosmopolitan in style, fascinating in its subtlety and complexity.”