[act-ma] Leonardo Padura Festival: Early October

[Charlie Welch]

  October 2017: Leonardo Padura Festival

What began with some planning for a small Cuban film festival by members 
of the Boston-Cuba Solidarity Coalition has turned into an area festival 
for celebrated Cuban novelist, and film-maker, Leonardo Padura. Public 
events will take place at the following times and places:

  * Tu, Oct 10: 6:30 Reading/book signing at Coolidge Corner Library
  * Ths, Oct 12: noon-2:00 Northeastern University
  * Tu Oct 17: 2:00-5:00 Boston University
  * Tu Oct 17: 700-9:00 – July26/Leonardo Padura joint program with the
    Witness for Peace-sponsored tour with Cuban poet and popular
    educator Marcel Lueiro Reyes at Northeastern.

Details and locations, and additional programs including film showings, 
to be posted on the website below

Padura’s wide popularity is rooted in the series of noir detective 
novels he’s written, the first four of which have been made into films. 
The “Four Seasons in Havana” quartet is available on Netflix; it is 
being made into an English language series for cable starring Antonio 
Banderas.

The festival will be screening two Padura films in Spanish with English 
subtitles after which their will be Q&A with the author: “Winds of 
Havana/Vientos de La Habana,” an expanded version of the first in the 
Netflix series that is an introduction to the world of Mario Conde 
featuring the whole crew from the old neighborhood and his high school 
days as well as police colleagues and Havana itself. In “Return to 
Ithaca/Regreso a Itaca,” Leonardo wrote the screenplay about a 
generation gathering for a rooftop dinner in Havana and to make sense of 
the past and present.

Padura’s writing in general is deeply involved with Cuban history and 
politics. /Adios Hemingway/ is a case in point. /The Man Who Loved Dogs/ 
is an extended treatment of three intersecting stories: the last decades 
in the life of Leon Trotsky, the life of his assassin Ramon Mercader, 
and the tale of the Cuban novelist who discovers Mercader living out his 
last years in Havana after prison. Padura’s most recent book, 
/Heretics//,/ is a sweeping 500+ page historical novel, of art theft, 
anti-Semitism and Jewish identity, and contemporary Cuba that begins in 
1939 with the /Saint Louis /sailing from Hamburg into Havana with 
hundreds of Jewish refugees seeking asylum.

Among the biographies of Leonardo Padura, the /Wikipedia 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_Padura_Fuentes>/ entry has 
numerous informative references and links including Jon Lee Anderson’s 
notable overview in his October 21, 2013 Letter from Havana in the /New 
Yorker/, “Private Eyes.” 
<https://peterbmiller.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/andersononpaduranyer.pdf>

Note that the current trip is occasioned by Padura’s receipt of the 
Avellaneda Prize from the Cuban Cultural Center of New York — /La 
Avellaneda/ Medal is the Center’s most prestigious literary award — and 
“presentations of books and films in NY and Boston.”

/Festival cosponsors include: The Brookline Public Library, the 
Brookline Booksmith, and Brookline PAX; the Department of Cultures, 
Societies and Global Studies, Northeastern University; the Howard 
Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Department of Romance Languages, and 
Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University; Witness for Peace; 
and the Boston Latino International Film Festival, bliff.org 
<http://www.bliff.org>, running from September 28-October 1./

Check for updates at /july26.org./

For more information, contact info at july26.org.





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