Preservation Conversation: Death of a Bureaucrat
Preservation Conversation: Death of a Bureaucrat
North American Restoration Premiere. Free for Museum Members. Post-screening conversation with Academy Film Archive Preservation Officer Joe Lindner and UCLA Librarian T-Kay Sangwand.
North American Restoration Premiere
Free for Museum Members.
A conversation about preserving Cuban visual culture with Academy Film Archive Preservation Officer Joe Lindner and UCLA Librarian for Digital Collection Development T-Kay Sangwand will follow the screening.
Death of a Bureaucrat
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea was the most internationally successful director from post-revolutionary Cuba. The blackest of comedies, this film satirizes the byzantine nature of bureaucracy, and is thus still a favorite of Cuban audiences. The protagonist, known only as the Nephew (Salvador Wood), simply wants to help his aunt get her late husband’s pension—but his uncle, a loyal Cuban Socialist patriot, was buried with his official work card. An escalating series of “official” responses leads to increasingly dark slapstick chaos. The original camera negative for the film suffered severe damage from mold, humidity, and acetate deterioration; a digital restoration was performed in 2019.
Note by Academy Film Archive Preservation Officer Joe Lindner.
DIRECTED BY: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. WRITTEN BY: Alfredo L. del Cueto, Ramón F. Suárez, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. WITH: Salvador Wood, Silvia Planas, Manuel Estanillo. 1966. 86 min. Cuba. B&W. Spanish. 4K DCP. Restored by the Academy Film Archive and the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos.
Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.
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