Screening: Motherland or Death

For more than 50 years Cuba has been following the battle-cry of the revolution: Patria o Muerte, which translates as Motherland or Death. For more than fifty years Cuba’s revolutionary mantra has been a daily dilemma for several Cuban generations.

Motherland or Death by veteran Russian documentarian Vitaly Mansky centers around the generation born before the revolution. As they reach the end of their lives, they begin to understand that they no longer have to live by that decades-old revolutionary mantra. They are devoted to their motherland with heart and soul, yet curse the circumstances in which they are forced to live.

Mansky portrays a stark gap between Cuba’s carefully crafted image and the reality of daily life, depicting Havana as a desolate place, a dilapidated skeleton, broken up and rearranged with stray dogs and cats, meat rations, lamp posts as gallows, and angry spewing sewers.

Directed by Vitaly Mansky
Duration: 99′
Year: 2012

This screening is part of One World Echoes, an international tour celebrating the 15th anniversary of One World, Europe´s largest human rights film festival established in Prague in 1998 by Czech NGO People in Need.

One World Echoes are co-organized by the Czech Centre London, Open City London Documentary Festival (20-23 June) and the Frontline Club.