CubaObituaryPastor Vega
Cuban maker of feature films and documentaries, and long-standing director of the Havana International Film FestivalThe Cuban film director Pastor Vega, who has died from cancer aged 65, was best known for Retrato de Teresa (Portrait Of Teresa, 1979), but he was also a highly accomplished maker of documentaries. As the first director of the Havana International Film Festival, he also played a leading role in the management of the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC).
Portrait Of Teresa, with his wife Daisy Granados in the title role, was a piece of realism about the break-up of a marriage and proved to be ICAIC's most controversial movie in 20 years. It was seen by half the population of Havana within six weeks of its release, and provoked a huge public response, with heated debates in the media and on street corners.
Born in Havana, Vega was the son of the popular singer Justo Vega. He began his career as an actor in 1958, going to the theatre school run by the brother and sister team of Vicente and Raquel Revuelta.
Two years later, he joined the institute, which had been established in 1959, shortly after the revolution, and at first he worked there as both an actor and assistant director. He moved to direct documentaries from 1964 on.
These included Hombres del cañaveral (Canecutters, 1965), La canción del turista (Song Of The Tourist, 1966), and his first feature-length work, Viva la Republica! (1972), which, along with the early documentaries of directors such as Santiago Alvarez and Sara Gómez, suggested that Cuban cinema was developing a unique tone of voice, and that it was far from the strident political tract that might have been expected.
Hombres and La canción abandoned commentary for inventive montage. Viva la Republica! was a history of what Cubans call the "pseudo-republic" set up under the tutelage of the United States, after the Cuban-Spanish-American War of 1898. It was told through highly ironic use of archive footage.
Vega was an enthusiastic supporter of the revolution, and an intellectual who frequently wrote about the problems and issues of Cuban cinema. His Marxism was influenced by the writings of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, and he perceived cinema as an instrument of ideological struggle within the revolution, to be used particularly against vestiges of pre-revolutionary behaviour, such as machismo.
None of his films after Portrait Of Teresa - most of them starring Daisy Granados - enjoyed the same success, although the last, Las profesías de Amanda (Amanda's Prophecies, 2001) was much liked.
In 1979, the year that Portrait Of Teresa came out, he became the first director of the Havana International Film Festival, and he stayed director for 12 years, as the festival became the leading such event in Latin America. He was unfailingly urbane and always in good humour, despite the toll that the festival took of his own creative work.
In the 1990s, when the demise of Soviet communism pushed Cuba into economic crisis and the film institute had to struggle hard to survive, Vega criticised its loss of direction. He appeared, as a critic, in an independent video documentary, Secuencias inconclusas (Incomplete Sequences, 1997) which was made by a young art school graduate, Amanda Chávez.
He returned to the theatre in the past few years, where he directed, among other plays, a production of Diatriba de amor contra un hombre sentado (Diatribe Of Love Against A Seated Man) by Gabriel García Márquez, a production seen in Mexico and Cuba.
He is survived by Daisy Granados, and sons Hiram, an actor, and Aaron, an actor and film director.
· Pastor Vega, film director, born February 12 1940, died June 2 2005.
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