San Antonio de los Baños, Artemisa, Cuba - It's December 15th, 1986. It could be another day in Ariguanabo, but it will be longer. 26 years is the date Quetzalcoatl or the serpent feathered biting its tail and stop the Utopia of the Eye and the Ear of the International School of Film and Television in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba.
This was signed by Fernando Birri, poetic genius of cinema, who initialed the birth certificate from school of all worlds, against the verticality of a top-down teaching, that arise here overcoming false antithesis authoritarian and static teaching-learning, just surpassed by "learning to teach."
Conceived as atypical campus, formed therein generations aspire to be the center of production of the overall image, because only the video and television can synthesize the historical evolution of audiovisual old dream of democracy.
Film and magnetic tape used as support materials, electronic filmic languages and codes, analyzed and practiced in their field and their symbiosis, for the specifically cinematic, 35 and 16mm, while television and video use various electronic brushes coats. For both color, and black and white, exercise in fiction and documentary.
Thanks to the Foundation of New Latin American Cinema was born this school of theory and practice inextricably linked, low voltages for the release of underdevelopment and in search of economic identity, technical and scientific, spiritual and historical. Is legacy of the founding fathers to be receptive to the models and input from international schools, but never trace the call "First World" or follow other socio-cultural patterns realities.
A fantasy came to life in the ariguanabense center, whose logo explains the intention of the learning process: a red circle, a blue square and a yellow triangle superimposed. This should meet the most urgent needs of the New Latin American Cinema: initiation, completion and improvement, all to meet the expectations of the labor market and the creative urge.
They work here three types of education: Basic Course / Regular, for most filmmakers and teleastas that, lacking these schools, have served their initiation and empirical work. For that level is the yellow triangle.
The training that is answered within the blue square corresponds to the Experimental Workshop. They express the right not inhibited by fear of error. Finally, there is the so-called High Studies Dialogue as the red circle, where those with a professional work accomplished, sought to increase the frequency of mutual contacts.
The governing body and faculty is composed of international experts in audiovisual communication. This team is not made up of "leftovers" of the industry, but professional "assets" that continue to form each other in everyday productions.
The school does not depend on institutional, or economic, or bureaucratically of the Socialist Republic of Cuba, but of autonomous Latin American Film Foundation. Only the political and cultural will of this nation and fraternal hospitality allowed its realization in this country. So says Fernando Birri, to sign the birth certificate during wakefulness of the Crescent Moon and insomnia of the Full Moon.
