THE LOST CITY

Year: 2005
USA: Magnolia Pictures
UK: Lionsgate UK
Cast: Steven Bauer, Richard Bradford, Nestor Carbonell, Lorena Feijóo, Andy Garcia, Dustin Hoffman, William Marquez, Julio Oscar Mechoso, Tomas Milian, Enrique Murciano, Bill Murray, Elizabeth Pena, Millie Perkins, Tony Plana, Ines Sastre
Director: Andy Garcia
Country: USA
USA: 143 mins
UK: 144 mins
USA Rated: R for violence
UK Certificate: 15 contains strong violence and real images of executions
USA Release Date: 28 April 2006 (Limited Release)
UK Release Date: 5 December 2008 (Limited Release)
UK DVD Release Date: 11 May 2009
US Distributor

Synopsis

THE LOST CITY is actor/director Andy Garcia's bittersweet lyric celebration of Cuban culture that took him 16 years to make. Using music, literature and dance, City captures Havana in full tropical bloom during the late 1950s.

Where BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB commemorated an era of Cuban music before it slipped away, THE LOST CITY captures the moment where performers like Beny More electrified audiences with that rhythm, a rhythm that made Havana the Pearl of the Antilles.

Scripted by Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the film builds like a vivid tropical fever-dream; a love story and revolution set to music.

Centered in El Tropico, a nightclub roughly modeled after Havana's famous Tropicana, proprietor Fico Fellove (Andy Garcia) tries to hold his family and club together as the dictator Batista's reign of terror comes crashing down around him. Ultimately, to survive, Fico must leave everything he loves.

THE LOST CITY is every immigrant's story—a paean to lost culture. It's a time and place in history that still lives vividly in the imagination of the exile. And as conjured by Infante and Garcia, this is a land where rhythm can't be exiled. You can leave the country, but the rhythm will never leave you.

Along with its original score, THE LOST CITY sings with 40 different songs. Mambos, chachachas, rumbas, toques, danzones, boleros. Together they create an oral history of Cuba. They are love songs to an indomitable culture—a culture that reveals itself in music, but also in dance, in poetry, in Catholicism, in African and European heritages, in Revolution, in tobacco, in Santeria and the azure sky and water that surround the island.

These are the residents of THE LOST CITY.

Actor/director Andy Garcia has a history of celebrating his maestros. His 1993 acclaimed documentary, CACHAO...COMO SU RITMO NO HAY DOS, is a musical tribute to Israel Lopez "Cachao," the musical prodigy who created the mambo. In THE LOST CITY, Garcia champions another Cuban legend, the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Infante is a major Latin American literary figure. He created a style of fiction that was distinctly Cuban in its origins and influences, but then refracted those themes through Groucho Marx.