Dok night: LA ULTIMA CENA 1976 (The Last Supper) Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

This film coming out of Cuba is a full-force blast against colonial slavery, the hypocrisies of capitalism and the church. The angle is surrealist, and the spirit is imaginary despite it being a razor-sharp social critique. It was directed by Cuba’s most prolific filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Fresa y chocolate). In a way, many of his movies are about striking a balance between the individual and the collective. He was a radical film director who always questioned every institutionalized system, it didn’t matter if it was a political system or a standardized formula of filmmaking. For this movie he cited Bertolt Brecht and Sergei Eisenstein as key influences, and the focus of this flick is based on real events adapted from historical documents.

What’s the story? One day a wealthy landlord gets drunk, and since it’s Easter week, he gathers twelve of his black slaves into his château, and goes about staging the last supper of Christ. Along the way the slave-apostles are allowed to eat as much as they want from the banquet table, as the slave-owner talks of charity and forgiveness. He also pontificates with arrogance about humility and the need for one to humbly accept one’s place in life. I will of course let the rest of the movie unfold for itself. It could be considered just a black comedy, if it wasn’t for its barbed insights and more than a few hard punches along the way. It’s got that biting humor that can be found in Monty Python or Luis Buñuel. And just as with both of those references, the film isn’t one-sided, but also questions on a deeper level complicated issues about what is really freedom and what is really slavery.

A film about the slave revolts, balancing seriousness and absurdity. The film is broken into four segments—Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and culminating on Easter Sunday. In other words, this is a perfect time of year to see this flick.