Las noches de Constantinopla
Cuba,
2001, 115 min
Shown in 2002
CREDITS
- dir
-
Orlando Rojas
- prod
-
Camilo Vives, Felix Rodríguez
- scr
-
Manuel A. Rodríguez, Orlando Rojas
- cam
-
Angel Alderete
- editor
-
Lina Baniela
- mus
-
Pavel Urkiza
- cast
-
Liberto Rabal, Verónica Lynn, Francisco Rabal, Maria Isabel Díaz Lago, Rosa Fornés, Zulema Clares
- source
-
Relaciones Internacionales ICAIC, Calle 23 No. 1107 (interior) e/8 y 10, Vedado, La Habana, 10400, Cuba. FAX: 537-55-1188. EMAIL: internacional@icaic.inf.cu.
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Orlando Rojas in person.
OTHER
Art, secrets and the absurd power of dreams and sexuality are linked in this funny, often farcical tale of a Cuban family staging a long overdue revolt. Villa Florida is a strange, old-world island in modern Havana, a gated mansion, dark and oppressive with heavy polished furniture and the paintings of Doña Eugenia, a talented artist and the controlling matriarch. Her brother Jorge is a fat ruin of a man, embittered by his decades-long separation from his one true love. Greta, her daughter, is a somnambulistic, repressed spinster. Eugenia’s favorite grandson, Hernán, meanwhile, writes erotica on the sly. The eccentric clan includes the maid and her son, who aspires to stage a transvestite cabaret. When Hernán’s sexy novel, Nights of Constantinople, wins a prestigious international award, it sets off a chain of events that changes life inside Villa Florida forever. The frequent and droll references to gothic convention—a scene of Greta sleepwalking, pallid and blank-eyed in a filmy negligee, could have come from one of Roger Corman’s Poe adaptations—make the family’s rebellion all the more comic and satisfying. It’s as if director Orlando Rojas marched into the House of Usher, yanked down the heavy curtains to let in the tropical sun and pinched some color into the family’s cheeks.
—Pamela Troy
FACTOID #125
According to the November 29, 1959 San Diego Union, The Village on the River was the first Dutch feature ever shown in the U.S. (at the Third San Francisco International Film Festival).
