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FILM REVIEWS
Cartas del parque. Dir. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Script: Eliseo Alberto, Gabriel García Márquez, and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Cuba/Spain, 1988. Duration: 87 minutes.
In Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, Janet Gurkin Altman defines the writing of letters as a fictional narrative form with the "power to connect or to interfere" (22), as a mediator with the primary function of connecting between two distant points, "as a bridge between sender and receiver," and as a literary genre with an author who can "choose to emphasize either the distance or the bridge" (13). Based on a plot and collaborative intervention of Gabriel García Márquez in the writing of the script, Cartas del parque (Letters from the Park] is a movie by acclaimed Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Aléa (1928-1996)-Fresa y chocolate (1993), Guantanamera (1994)-that integrates within the medium of film the concept of the letter as a connector, a mediator, and a bridge.
The setting is 1913 Matanzas, Cuba, with an atmosphere immersed in the spirit of a new century energized by the prospect and promises of twentieth-century modern science and technology. Poetry presents in the film...