The Last Supper (Alea, 1976): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm
This film is part of a Cuban cinema season at the ICA. Full details here.
ICA introduction: This powerful drama brings a pious sugar plantation owner, in 1790s Cuba, attempting to head off an uprising, to share his table at Easter with 12 enslaved men. A radical and often surreal parable showing slavery as an economic system and championing Black resistance. “A masterpiece from the first image to the last”. The film was inspired by a real story. The impressive dinner sequence is the structural core of the film: almost an hour, which feels experimental and chaotic. “Let me see if I understand, when overseer beats me, I should be happy?” says one man at the table to the plantation owner. It is an extraordinary meditation on speech and power, slavery and freedom, submission and rebellion, ideology and oppression, ritual and ethics. 2026 marks its 50th anniversary. The screening will be introduced by a Cuban film specialist.
Time Out review:
A brilliant Godardian parable, reflecting the contemporary Cuban
situation through a tale of a slave revolt on a sugar plantation in late
18th century Havana (historically, the moment when the old slave-based
industry was under pressure from the new mechanised European techniques
of sugar refining, and when the heady scent of freedom was sniffed in
the air). The action takes place over the days of Easter, culminating
when a rich, fanatically religious landowner reconstructs the Last
Supper with twelve slaves. But when the slaves' response theatens his
economic interests, the pious Christian suppresses the uprising. This
complex indictment of religious hypocrisy and cultural colonisation
reflects the same subtlety as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's earlier Memories of Underdevelopment.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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