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Reviewed by Elliot V. Kotek
(June 2011, screening at the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival)

Directed by: Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray
Featuring: Ricardo Porro, Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi

Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray’s documentary deposits us into gently undulating art school buildings in Havana, Cuba, that have been abandoned, are desolate and overgrown, and are, most certainly, unfinished. Juxtaposing 1959 footage of Castro overthrowing Batista and other images of the passion and spirit of that revolution with interviews with Cuban artists, “Unfinished Spaces” measures the unrealized potential of the revolution on the art scene and, in particular, the art schools of Cuba.

Castro commissioned the schools with the goal of transforming what was once a bourgeois golf course into a collection of the best art buildings in the world. Given two months to finish the drafting, architects came together with students and unleashed unbridled enthusiasm into expressions of modernism and experimentation borne from necessity (given the embargo on importing materials). With Catalonian vaults and terracotta bricks, the schools inspired thousands to shelve the reservations of their former selves and embrace the buildings as well as the revolution’s early appetite for artistic expression (or internal revolution, perhaps, as one of the architects, Ricardo Porro, explains).

Within little time, however, terrorist outbursts and events such as the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis consumed a state trying to curry favors with its Soviet backers. The violence and the Soviet influences then forming the tenets under which Cuba was ruled were also accompanied by the prefabricated ugliness ordained by the Ministry of Construction and divided the practice of architecture along lines of elitism and aestheticism versus practicality and modesty.

The filmmakers comprehensively explore the various military and personal influences that led to discipline being instituted at the school, to gay students being expelled and, eventually, to the stoppage of any “nonproductive construction,” which mandated that the arts buildings be abandoned. As a documentary about a place and space, the directors do well to reveal the inner exigencies of life under the Cuban revolution’s famed and infamous leaders and present an inherently watchable insight into both the personalities and the changing politics of the region in the late 1950s and through the 1960s.

While the story may have ended with the abandonment of construction, the art schools have been picked up as a cause by a variety of advocates over the years, and while students returned in the 1980s and disregarded/accepted the dereliction, the collapse of the Soviet Empire sucked the support out of Cuba’s economy. Alternately used as places of education and squatters’ housing, and stripped for materials then restored and stripped again, the structures have integrated themselves into the region as works of art and architecture of note. That they could also be seen as being representative of the collective experiences of the Cuban populace over time is undeniable.

Despite the title, “Unfinished Spaces” is no doubt only a record of the initial chapters of this property’s life.

Photo courtesy Los Angeles Film Festival