We feel very priviledged to be offering you the opportunity to win a photograph by the wonderful Iain Clark at our HGFF raffle this week. You can buy raffle tickets, £5 each, at all of our festival events and become a friend of HGFF. we will announce the winner on the last day of the festival. Rebecca from our HGFF team talked to Iain about Cuba and the photograph, here’s what he had to say:
I had the pleasure of meeting Eirene Houston the festival director to hear about her plans for the Havana Glasgow Film Festival. I was greatly impressed by Eirene, her enthusiasm and passion for Cuba and the fact she had managed to pull the whole thing off. As a fellow fan of Cuba I was delighted to offer (as a means of raising funds for next years festival) one of the limited edition prints from ‘And that was the beginning of the end of that’ an exhibition about a trip I made to Cuba in February. The exhibition will be on show at the Thistle Gallery in Park Road Glasgow from 30th January – 14th February next year.
In my mind Cuba was always a mythical place, a Shangri-La in a troubled world. A Caribbean island caught in a time warp for the last fifty years and I knew things were beginning to change so I wanted to go and record it as it currently is.
I wanted to show what life is like for ordinary Cuban people. They are a wonderful race who have had to put up with great privation for many years but have somehow managed not only to survive without a lot of the basic necessities but have thrived and endured the hardship with grace and dignity. Despite the hardship I found them to be amazingly happy and positive about their situation.
The print I have donated is called ‘Horses Head, Security Guard and Che, Havana’ to me it sums up the way of life in Cuba. In the centre of the composition is a relaxed looking a security guard sitting on an old wooden chair outside a typically distressed Havana building, to the right there is a mural of Che looming large and to the left there is the head of a horse about to enter the scene.
I am thrilled and excited to be involved with the festival and I am very much looking forward to seeing the films and meeting up with some of the participants. Its wonderful to have a touch of Cuba in Glasgow in November.
You can find out more about Iain and his work here:
http://www.iainclark.net/home/cuba
http://www.hungertv.com/feature/and-that-was-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-that/
