Great films of the cuban film industry: MARIA ANTONIA

By: Antonio Mazón Robau

María Antonia, a sensual, hard-hearted and violent woman, lives in marginal surroundings in Havana in the decade of the fifties. Her uncontrolled passion for Julián, a young boxer, ambitious and ladies’ man, will lead her to fulfill a tragic destiny despite an encounter with neither true love nor the beliefs in African religious practices that rule her life. This is, in essence the synopsis of María Antonia (1990) a Sergio Giral film, an outstanding piece of the film industry of the times, from the homonymous work of Cuban play writer Eugenio Hernández Espinosa, adapted by Armando Dorrego to the movies. 

The film interpreted by Alina Rodríguez, Alexis Valdés, Roberto Perdomo, José Antonio Rodríguez, Asseneh Rodríguez, Elena Huerta, Tito Junco, Eduardo Macías, Andrés Hernández, Daisy Granados, Sonia Pérez, Ana Lillian Rentería  and Micheline Calvert, the photo Works of Angel Alderete and the Síntesis Group music, was a good hit for its director and script writer Sergio Giral (Havana, 1937), who began his career in 1961 in ICAIC (Cuban Institute of the Film Industry) as assistant to the director and stage director.  Afterwards he began to film documentaries and some two dozen short length movies, before his first fiction film, El otro Francisco in 1974.  He will be known, above all by negritude issue films through historic movies as  Maluala, Plácido, Rancheador and El otro Francisco, or located in nearer scenarios as María Antonia.

María Antonia was quite welcomed by Cuban movie critique, including it among most significant films of the year in its annual selection and the film won the Award of the International Movie Clubs Federation (FICC) and the Coral Prize in the music category in the International New Latin American Movie Festival in Havana, as well as the Great Prize and the award to Alina Rodríguez as best actress in the Latin Festival in New York and the Citá di Trieste Award in the Latin American Movie Festival in Trieste, Italy.