Premièred at HAVANA FILM FESTIVAL, December 2000.
North American première at HOTDOCS, Sunday 6 May, 2001.

Invited to Dok Leipzig, It’s All True (São Paulo), Cartagena, Gothenburg, and St.Kilda Film Festivals, et al.

Produced by Patrik Axén, Directed by Adam Sébire, Edited by Bin Li.

Made at the Escuela Internactional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) in Cuba, 1999.

Beyond the beautiful colours of Cuba’s people lies the changing symbolism of her socialist red, the influence of the Greenback, as well as the political and material colours that tint the world’s most famous cigars. Forty years after Ché and Fidel’s Cuban Revolution, capitalism, communism, and Havana Cigars remain intertwined…

“At the heart of our little film is a celebration of the multiculturalism and cultural endurance of the people of Cuba. It uses the old Partagas Cigar Factory in Havana as a microcosm of Cuban society, and as a source of the documentary’s metaphors.

The title, ¿Cuántos Colores?, (in English, “How many colours?”) begins as a literal reference to the process of cigar classification, where a skilled worker can class around 100 shades of colour in the tobacco.

The film extrapolates this idea to the ‘colours’ of Cuba’s population – the song Piel Canela (“Cinnamon Skin”) accompanies a montage of workers faces and hands during which the cigar classer says she has no single favourite colour : “I’ve been working here for so long that all of them are beautiful, ” she says.

The metaphor also extends to the changing political colours of Cuba; the cigar has a long-standing symbolism for capitalists and, since the Cuban Revolution, for communists as well. Today Cuba’s communist red is sorely tested by the increasing influence of the colour of money, specifically the yankee Greenback.

The underlying theme is perhaps that Cubans’ dignity, diversity and cultural endurance enable them to survive beyond the short-term ideological tugs-of-war they face.” — Adam Sébire

The making of ¿Cuántos Colores? reads as a catalogue of disasters, mostly associated with the politically sensitive nature of filmmaking in Cuba. The country began a revolutionary crackdown (1999) on foreign influences just as the director arrived for his 3 month exchange with the Cuban Film School; the project was officially prohibited by the government of Old Havana the day before shooting began; our aging Soviet crew transporter blew up whilst filming a surreptitious tracking shot near Communist Party HQ; the director and DOP were subsequently arrested filming from the back of a bicycle-taxi; Cuba’s only processing laboratory experienced regular blackouts causing rushes to be left immersed in chemical baths; and finally, US customs officers tried to confiscate the director’s Havana Cigars in Miami on the way back to Australia.

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