Biography
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea was a Cuban film director and screenwriter. Born in Havana in 1928, he studied law at the University of Havana before training in film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome from 1951 to 1953. After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, he co-founded the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) and directed the regime’s first official feature, Stories of the Revolution (1960).
His best-known works include Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), which he also wrote, and Strawberry and Chocolate (1993). He directed more than twenty features, documentaries and shorts, often balancing support for the revolution with critical examination of its social and political effects. Gutiérrez Alea died in Havana in 1996.
