Fernando Pérez Valdés (born 1944) is a prominent Cuban film director.
His father, who was a postman, took him to see his first movie when he was 6 or 7 years old. It was a western and Pérez recalls vividly the effect all those cowboys and indians had on him. “It’s not like I said to myself, ‘Aha, I’m going to become a movie director’, but the identification had begun. And it would become a vocation.”
Pérez graduated from the University of Havana with a degree in Language and Spanish Literature, and began working in the Cuban film industry in 1971 as an assistant director, before directing his first documentary in 1975.
His feature debut was the drama Clandestinos (1987) but it wasn’t until Madagascar (1994) that he garnered significant international recognition. Pérez later directed La Vida es Silbar (1998) and Suite Habana (2003).
Suite Habana is considered by some critics to be the best Cuban film in decades. Variety hailed it as “A lyrical, meticulously-crafted and unexpectedly melancholy homage to the battered but resilient inhabitants of a battered but resilient city.”
His most recent film called Madrigal tells a story about life in the theater world. His next film was biopic that cover the childhood and early teenage years of Cuban national hero Jose Marti entitled Marti: El ojo del Canario, which premiered in 2010 an earned several awards in the film Festival Circuit.
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The Cuban History, Hollywood.
Arnoldo Varona, Editor.