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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, 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, whom
critic David Thomson likened to Jorge-Luis Borges and Gabriel
Garcia Marques, City 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 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.
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, 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.
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