Zombies storm Havana cinema festival

Associated Press

HAVANA

The hottest ticket in Havana is a gory, campy zombie flick with a wicked sense of humor about Cuba’s obsessive relations with the United States, one that revels in islanders’ knack for making the best of things even when everything around you — buildings, streets, human limbs — is falling to pieces.

Audiences thronged movie houses this week to catch screenings of “Juan of the Dead,” or “Juan de los Muertos” in the original Spanish, and organizers had to hastily add extra midnight screenings to accommodate the crush.

The Charles Chaplin Cinema bustled with several hundred eager spectators who stormed the doors once they opened Thursday night. And that was just those with special connections: journalists, family and friends of people involved in the movie, workers linked to Cuba’s film institute. Hundreds more lined up outside.

“Zombies in Havana, don’t you want to see that?” writer-director Alejandro Brugues said. He said he was “euphoric” to see the crowds and credited it to the movie’s first-of-its kind nature for Cuba, whose films tend to be low-budget affairs about ordinary life. Trailers for the movie have circulated in the year since it was filmed.

Yasumari Alvarez, a Cuban film institute employee, said she was drawn by the novelty of a homegrown production that uses computer-generated effects to transform the Cuban capital.

It’s no spoiler to reveal that even in a city where many buildings are already crumbling, a zombie apocalypse does not change the skyline for the better.

“It’s the first Cuban film with special effects. All Havana is destroyed,” said Alvarez.

While outright political dissent is not tolerated by Cuba’s Communist-run government, artists and intellectuals have always enjoyed a measure of freedom, especially when the barbs come wrapped in humor. “Juan of the Dead’s” edginess is on display from the beginning shot, which shows Juan reclining on a fishing raft off Havana’s famous seafront promenade, the Malecon.

His sidekick, Lazaro, asks Juan if he’s ever thought of attempting the dangerous crossing to Miami. No, Juan replies, because then I’d have to work.

Suddenly the movie springs into action as a decaying zombie bursts through the surf, only to be felled by Lazaro with a harpoon through the eye.

As attacks by the undead mount, the government keeps insisting on nightly newscasts that they are not reanimated corpses but dissident agitators in league with the “empire,” an official label for the U.S.

Brugues insisted that his movie is not political.