Madagascar

Madagascar (1994) is a Cuban film that marked Fernando Pérez's change of direction into a more lyrical approach to filmmaking, somehow stripped from the realistic documentary feel of his early work. The film chronicles the relationship and lack of communication between a mother and daughter during the Cuban economic crisis known as the Special Period. Background and plot synopsis Madagascar was originally conceived as the first part of a trilogy to be entitled 'Pronóstico del tiempo' ("Weather Prediction"). The production and post-production of director Fernando Pérez's third fiction film was completed in September 1993 to await the preparation of the work's other two parts: 'Melodrama' ("Melodrama," dir. Rolando Díaz) and 'Quiéreme y verás' ("Love me and you’ll see," dir. Daniel Díaz Torres). The three directors had worked together to develop their ideas for the creation of the project, but in the end, according to Pérez, the films wound up lacking the necessary continuity necessary to bind them together. Partly as a result of such concerns over their contents, and partly in response to the delays produced by an ongoing shortage of production funds for Díaz's and Díaz Torres' works, each wound up being released independently. During December 1994, over one year after the completion of its post-production, Madagascar first appeared in Cuba's theatres as part of the annual New Latin American Film Festival held in Havana. Madagascar was inspired by the 1984 Mirta Yáñez short story "Beatles contra Duran Duran" ("Beatles Against Duran Duran"). The story chronicles the relationship between the narrator, who is a single mother and pragmatic middle-aged professor of physics, and her moody adolescent daughter. The plot of the film draws loosely from the original text, which Pérez appears to have used as a point of departure and a rough character sketch as he worked closely with cinematographer Raúl Pérez Ureta and screenwriter Manuel Antonio Rodríguez during the developmental stages of the project. Laura (played by Zaida Castellanos) and Laurita (played by Laura de la Uz) are the central characters of the film and bear an obvious resemblance to the unnamed narrator of the short story and her daughter, Pilar. However, the film's mode of expression as well as its plot both diverge greatly from that of the story.