# Lucía
**Lucía** is a 1968 Cuban black-and-white feature film directed by Humberto Solás, structured as a triptych (work of three panels/sections shown as one piece) of three stories about three different Cuban women, each named Lucía, living through three decisive moments in the country's history: the war of independence from Spain in 1895, the uprising against the [Gerardo Machado](https://www.edgepedia.org/gerardo-machado) dictatorship in the 1930s, and the postrevolutionary 1960s.[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/30298) • [2](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/lucia-2/) Produced by the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), it runs about 160 minutes and is widely regarded as a landmark of Cuban cinema.[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/30298) • [3](https://mubi.com/es-es/us/films/lucia)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Director / year | Humberto Solás, Cuba, 1968[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/30298) |
| Structure | Three episodes, each centered on a woman named Lucía: 1895, 1932, and the postrevolutionary 1960s[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/30298) |
| Lead actresses | Raquel Revuelta (Lucía 1895), Eslinda Núñez (Lucía 1932), Adela Legrá (Lucía 196_)[4](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/lucia/) |
| Technical specs | 160 minutes, black and white, 1.66:1 aspect ratio, Spanish language[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/30298) |
| Key crew | Screenplay by Solás, Julio García Espinosa, and Nelson Rodríguez; cinematography by Jorge Herrera; music by Leo Brouwer[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/30298) |
| Production | ICAIC; at the time the most expensive Cuban film ever made, directed when Solás was in his mid-20s[2](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/lucia-2/) |
| Award | Moscow Film Festival Gold Medal, 1969[5](https://www.encyclopedia.com/node/1268670) |
## Spoilers
### Plot
**1895.** Cuba, during the war of independence from Spain. Lucía (Raquel Revuelta), a young woman of the colonial aristocracy, wanders her family's estate, bored and romantic, while the country burns around her. She falls hard for Rafael (Eduardo Moure), a charming Spaniard who flatters her, pursues her through gardens and ballrooms, and swears devotion. What she does not know is that Rafael is a Spanish agent, and that his courtship is intelligence work: her brother is a Cuban revolutionary, and the rebels' gold is hidden on the family land. Lucía, lovesick and careless, inadvertently leads Rafael to her brother's secret headquarters.[15](https://db.ttfilmfestival.com/film/393/lucia/)
The betrayal detonates the episode's centerpiece, a battle at a coffee plantation where Spanish soldiers, white guerrillas, and a black cavalry fight in the mud. Solás stages the white combatants as nearly indistinguishable from one another while the black fighters, naked and clearly poorer, stand apart, a visual argument about class and race delivered mid-battle.[16](https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc50.2008/Lucia/index.html) The fighting is operatic, hand-to-hand, shot in close-up with a hand-held camera, and it ends with Lucía's world destroyed: her father dying, her brother's cause ruined, Rafael wounded. The episode closes with her alone in the wilderness, cradling the man she cannot forgive and cannot abandon, complicit in catastrophe from every direction.
**1933.** Havana, in the last convulsions of the Machado dictatorship. The second Lucía (Eslinda Núñez) is a sheltered middle-class young woman, supervised by a bourgeois mother, bored in the same way her 1895 predecessor was bored, but the streets outside are full of students and strikes. She meets Aldo, a passionate young revolutionary, and his politics become her education and her escape. She is drawn out of the parlor and into the crowd: demonstrations, gunfire, the intoxication of being part of something. Then Aldo is killed in the violence he pulled her into, and the episode turns on what a society does with its widows of lost causes. Lucía breaks down, and in the episode's most notorious scene she fires a gun at her mother's tea service, shattering the porcelain and the household's pretense in one gesture. The family simply closes over the wound. The men made the revolution; the women absorbed its losses.
After Aldo's death, Lucía flees across the vast white salt flats of Nuevitas, the camera chasing her in a long, frantic hand-held shot as she runs through the blinding landscape until she collapses. Solás wanted her genuinely exhausted: Núñez later recalled that she ran until she fainted, and he kept her disheveled, gasping look in the take. The film's poster was designed by Raúl Martínez, and Raquel Revuelta's hatted image from the first scene became one of the most repeated images in Cuban cinema.[17](https://www.cubacine.icaic.cu/es/articulo/lucia-antecedentes-y-testimonios)
**The 1960s.** The third Lucía (Adela Legrá) is a young, semi-literate rural woman of the post-revolutionary years. She leaves home to join the national literacy campaign, in which thousands of young volunteers were sent into the mountains to teach peasants to read. She is assigned to an isolated household headed by Tomás (Adolfo Llauradó), a proud, suspicious peasant who resents being taught, resents being taught by a woman most of all, and treats her with hostile contempt while his household watches. Her weapon is a primer and her patience. The film is honest about the cost: a parallel plot in which a neighboring woman's abusive husband kills her baby refuses to let literacy look like an easy cure for everything. Slowly, through small negotiations rather than speeches, Tomás's hostility thaws. When he finally sits down with the primer, the film does not pretend the marriage is healed; it shows a door cracked open. The final moment shows Lucía facing down her husband, and the audience, with a defiant stare from under a straw hat, and the ending stays unresolved, seen from a young girl's point of view.[18](https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/7115-lucia-in-progress)
### Characters
**Lucía of 1895 (Raquel Revuelta).** An aristocratic romantic whose passion for the wrong man destroys her family and her brother's cause. Revuelta plays her without irony: naive, then devastated, and finally clear-eyed in a way that is worse than madness.
**Lucía of 1933 (Eslinda Núñez).** A middle-class girl radicalized by love and discarded by history. Her breakdown is the episode's whole argument: the revolution's men die, its women shatter, and the bourgeois family absorbs the damage.
**Lucía of the 1960s (Adela Legrá).** A peasant woman who becomes an agent of history instead of its victim, armed with a literacy primer against a household's machismo. Her stare from under the straw hat is the film's lasting image.
**Rafael (Eduardo Moure).** The Spanish agent whose courtship of the first Lucía is espionage. Charming, possessive, and ultimately a wounded man she cannot leave.
**Aldo.** The young revolutionary of 1933 whose politics wake Lucía up and whose death puts her under.
**Tomás (Adolfo Llauradó).** The proud peasant patriarch of the final episode, whose resistance to being taught by a woman is the last enemy the film's heroines face.
### Interpretations and controversies
Solás refused the feminist label the film kept earning. "Lucía is not a film about women, it's a film about society," he said, arguing that women's role lays bare the contradictions of any period.[9](https://trigon-film.org/en/films/lucia/) The film's American history is its own controversy: it never got its stateside premiere at the inaugural New Directors/New Films in 1972 because the print failed to arrive from Cuba under the U.S. embargo,[2](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/lucia-2/) and at a March 1972 Cuban film festival screening in New York, anti-Castro protesters released white mice and set off a stink bomb before the Treasury Department shut the festival down the next day.[18](https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/7115-lucia-in-progress)
### Sequels, prequels, and universe
None. The triptych is self-contained, though Solás returned to period melodrama and to women at history's hinge in later films.
## The three episodes
**Lucía 1895.** The first episode is set during Cuba's war for independence from Spain. Raquel Revuelta plays the film's Lucía, a noblewoman whose love for a nation betrays her country without her meaning to: a Spanish officer, pretending to be an apolitical man of mixed Cuban and Spanish parentage come back to his native land, wins her over.[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/30298) • [6](https://bibliotecavirtual.clacso.org.ar/ar/libros/lasa98/McGilliway.pdf) The Film Society of Lincoln Center notes that this episode was inspired by [Luchino Visconti](https://www.edgepedia.org/luchino-visconti)'s *Senso*, and the [British Film Institute](https://www.edgepedia.org/british-film-institute)'s review describes its style as a "savage, Romantic symphony of extreme contrasts and melodramatic emotions," with a hysterically dancing camera and harsh exposures.[4](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/lucia/) • [7](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/10-treasures-from-archive-2017-london-film-festival-we-first-reviewed-them)
**Lucía 1932.** The second episode takes place during the workers' uprising against the Machado dictatorship. Its Lucía, played by Eslinda Núñez, is a member of the bourgeoisie drawn into the struggle; the episode moves from her sheltered middle-class life toward political commitment, and its visual register is closer to Hollywood melodrama of the 1940s.[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/30298) • [4](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/lucia/)
**Lucía 196_.** The third episode is set after the [Cuban Revolution](https://www.edgepedia.org/cuban-revolution) and is titled with an open final digit, signaling a present still being written. Its Lucía, played by Adela Legrá, is a rural newlywed struggling against patriarchal oppression, including her domineering husband Tomás (Adolfo Llauradó); the episode is a broadly drawn tale made in the spirit of the revolutionary moment, and it incorporates the literacy campaign of the period.[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/30298) • [4](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/lucia/) • [8](https://www.defa-stiftung.de/filme/filme-suchen/lucia/)
## Themes and intent
Solás himself framed the film as social rather than biographical: "Women's role always lays bare the contradictions of a period and makes them explicit: Lucía is not a film about women, it's a film about society."[9](https://trigon-film.org/en/films/lucia/) The film scholar John Mraz, cited in a LASA congress paper, placed the film in a Cuban context in which filmmakers, working from a historical-materialist mode of analysis, sought to present "the dialectic of perception and consciousness that is present in history."[6](https://bibliotecavirtual.clacso.org.ar/ar/libros/lasa98/McGilliway.pdf) Each episode is filmed in a visual style appropriate to the period it describes, so that the triptych works as a history of changing forms of consciousness as well as of events.[7](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/10-treasures-from-archive-2017-london-film-festival-we-first-reviewed-them)
## Production and reception
Solás made the film for ICAIC, the Cuban film institute founded after the victory of the Revolution, when he was in his mid-20s; at the time it was the most expensive Cuban film ever made.[2](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/lucia-2/) It won the Gold Medal at the 1969 Moscow Film Festival.[5](https://www.encyclopedia.com/node/1268670) The film did not receive its United States premiere at the inaugural New Directors/New Films in 1972 because the print failed to arrive from Cuba due to the U.S. embargo; it finally screened at the festival 49 editions later, in 2021.[2](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/lucia-2/)
Critical response has been sustained across decades. The BFI's Sight and Sound review of the 2017 restoration called it a "monument of virtuoso filmmaking" and "a model of how to tell a collective history in recognisably human terms," noting that the film closes on the face of a child, a glimpse of the next Lucía.[7](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/10-treasures-from-archive-2017-london-film-festival-we-first-reviewed-them) J. Hoberman, writing in The New York Times, called it "an openly tendentious tour de force considered by many as Cuban cinema's peak accomplishment."[10](https://mubi.com/en/films/lucia/critics-reviews) The critic Molly Haskell, writing in 1974, described it as "one of the few films, Left or Right, to deal with women on the same plane and in the same breath as major historical events."[4](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/lucia/) It was also included in the book *[1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die](https://www.edgepedia.org/1001-movies-you-must-see-before-you-die)*, edited by [Steven Schneider](https://www.edgepedia.org/steven-schneider).[11](https://www.imdb.com/es-es/title/tt0064609/)
## Restoration and home video
The film was restored by Cineteca di Bologna at the L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with ICAIC, with funding from [Turner Classic Movies](https://www.edgepedia.org/turner-classic-movies) and Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project; the restoration screened at the 55th [New York Film Festival](https://www.edgepedia.org/new-york-film-festival) in 2017.[4](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/lucia/) Criterion Collection released it as Spine #1045 within the box set *Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project No. 3*, paired with a 2020 documentary, *Humberto & "Lucía,"* by Carlos Barba Salva, featuring Solás and members of his cast and crew.[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/30298) • [12](https://criterionforum.org/review/lucia-after-the-curfew-the-criterion-collection-dual-format-edition)
## Other films titled Lucía
The title has been reused by unrelated films. *Lucía* (2010) is the first feature of the Chilean director Niles Atallah, an 80-minute portrait of a young seamstress in Santiago set in December 2006, between the funeral of the former dictator Pinochet and Christmas.[13](https://iffr.com/en/distribution/2017/films/luc%C3%ADa) *Lucía* (2023) is a 15-minute Spanish short drama directed by Marta Etura about four adolescent girls and a party invitation, certified by the ICAA as especially recommended for the promotion of gender equality.[14](https://sede.mcu.gob.es/CatalogoICAA/es-es/Peliculas/Detalle?pelicula=73522&q=true)
## References
1. [Lucía (1968), The Criterion Collection](https://www.criterion.com/films/30298)
2. [Lucía, Film Society of Lincoln Center, New Directors/New Films 2021](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/lucia-2/)
3. [Lucía (1968), MUBI, including critics reviews](https://mubi.com/es-es/us/films/lucia)
4. [Lucía, Film Society of Lincoln Center, 55th New York Film Festival](https://www.filmlinc.org/films/lucia/)
5. [Lucia, Encyclopedia.com](https://www.encyclopedia.com/node/1268670)
6. [McGilliway, LUCIA directed by Humberto Solás (1968), LASA paper](https://bibliotecavirtual.clacso.org.ar/ar/libros/lasa98/McGilliway.pdf)
7. [10 Treasures from the Archive at the 2017 London Film Festival, Sight and Sound, BFI](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/10-treasures-from-archive-2017-london-film-festival-we-first-reviewed-them)
8. [Filmdetails: LUCIA (1968), DEFA-Stiftung](https://www.defa-stiftung.de/filme/filme-suchen/lucia/)
9. [Lucia, trigon-film](https://trigon-film.org/en/films/lucia/)
10. [Lucía (1968) critic reviews on MUBI](https://mubi.com/en/films/lucia/critics-reviews)
11. [Lucía (1968), IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/es-es/title/tt0064609/)
12. [Lucía / After the Curfew Dual-Format Edition Review, Criterion Forum](https://criterionforum.org/review/lucia-after-the-curfew-the-criterion-collection-dual-format-edition)
13. [Lucía, International Film Festival Rotterdam](https://iffr.com/en/distribution/2017/films/luc%C3%ADa)
14. [LUCÍA (2023), Catálogo de Películas ICAA](https://sede.mcu.gob.es/CatalogoICAA/es-es/Peliculas/Detalle?pelicula=73522&q=true)
15. [https://db.ttfilmfestival.com/film/393/lucia/](https://db.ttfilmfestival.com/film/393/lucia/)
16. [https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc50.2008/Lucia/index.html](https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc50.2008/Lucia/index.html)
17. [https://www.cubacine.icaic.cu/es/articulo/lucia-antecedentes-y-testimonios](https://www.cubacine.icaic.cu/es/articulo/lucia-antecedentes-y-testimonios)
18. [https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/7115-lucia-in-progress](https://criterion-v2.herokuapp.com/current/posts/7115-lucia-in-progress)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1960s › Released 1966 to 1969*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license