Film Description

This film depicts the lives of the megano, peasants in the southern coastal region of Cuba who extract minerals from tree trunks to produce charcoal for the landowners. This is one of the first pre-revolutionary films to star common people (not professional actors) and portray the harsh lives of the rural poor. Every day, the men, women, and children of the family spend their days in the swamp, immersed in water up to their chests, prying tree trunks from the river's muddy bottom. Despite the wrenching poverty in which they live, the meganos have a stoic dignity and a love of family and of their culture and traditional music.

In the film, they also have a consciousness of their abject situation. They see the luxury in which the gringo tourists and their landlord live. This landlord controls everything--setting the prices of the charcoal, and charging them for their equipment and rent, and it is he who keeps the accounts for the illiterate peasants. "This can't go on like this!" says the head of the family. But torn between exploitation and the need to feed their wives and children, they have no choice. When a fire destroys their charcoal oven, the head of the family resolves to continue on. Shot in gorgeous black and white, this film was confiscated by the pre-revolutionary president but prefigured the films made under the Castro regime.