“A feature film about people, some of them real, some fictitious” declares an opening title card in Sara Gómez’s unclassifiable landmark of political cinema, One Way or Another (1974). If that’s not an indication that the boundaries of documentary and fiction filmmaking are set to crumble, then the flurry of sounds and images that follows definitely is. Gómez’s hybrid, freeform cinema captured the realities of life and love in postrevolutionary Cuba like no-one else before her. Merging still photography with filmed footage, voice-over narration with off-the-cuff recordings, and newsreels with romantic drama, One Way or Another seems to crystallize the qualities of an “imperfect cinema” espoused five years earlier by the Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa. Sure, the transitions between scenes were rarely smooth, and performances might shift between the authentic and the staged, the naturalistic or the wooden. But the film painted, in vivid, sometimes freeze-framed snapshots, the complexities of life in a newly socialist society with a vitality that was hard to imitate.

A fiercely independent filmmaker whose life was cut tragically short, Gómez became, in 1961, the first woman to join the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), established by the government in the wake of the revolution to nurture political filmmaking and a native film culture. There, Gómez worked with directors including Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Agnès Varda on numerous documentary shorts. As a Black Cuban woman and a student of Afro-Cuban ethnography, Gómez brought a distinctive perspective to the Latin American cinema of the time: highlighting issues of race, gender, and ethnicity, and the specifics of African heritage within the wider melting-pot of Cuban culture. This double bill presents two long-awaited restorations of Gómez’s films: One Way or Another, her iconic only feature, and an early documentary, the lyrical I’ll Go to Santiago (1964). From excavating the sights and sounds of Cuba’s African heritage to the perils of machismo in a revolutionary society, Gómez’s unique vision comes alive in these radiant restorations.