Andy Garcia Film Screened at Brattle

Within seconds, the 70 Harvard students and professors gathered at Brattle Theatre went silent. Camera phones clicked and the auditorium filled with whispers of, “Oh my God, it’s Andy!”

Actor-turned-director Andy Garcia took the stage yesterday afternoon for a special screening of his 2005 directorial debut, “The Lost City.”

The screening was part of a Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations tribute to Garcia for his humanitarian work.

Garcia has worked on behalf of hurricane victims, at-risk youth, and cancer patients during his career.

The foundation’s director, S. Allen Counter, said Garcia was a natural choice for the honor.

“Andy Garcia is very much respected by Cuban-American students for his support for democracy and freedom in Cuba and merging those ideas with the arts,” Counter said.

Garcia’s family fled Cuba when he was 5 years old, just two years after Fidel Castro came to power. The actor’s emotional attachment to the island was obvious at the reception following the screening.

“I would change everything about who I am to live in a free Cuba,” he told the crowd, holding back tears.

In an introduction to the screening, Garcia called “The Lost City,” which chronicles a well-to-do family divided over the Cuban Revolution, his “most important work.”

Garcia found little support among Hollywood producers as he tried for 16 years to sell the idea for the movie.

But through self-professed stubbornness, Garcia was able to shoot the project in the Dominican Republic for $9 million in 35 days, he said.

“That’s rock-bottom in the movie world,” he deadpanned.

Critics have blasted the film for presenting a misleading view of pre-revolutionary Cuba.

After the screening, Garcia told The Crimson that those critics were misinformed.

“When you make a movie about a political open wound, people will come at you with a political agenda,” Garcia said. “If a French filmmaker had made this movie, you would not have heard the same things. But I am a Cuban exile.”

Richard A. Serna ’10, vice president of the Latino Men’s Collective, which helped organize the event with the Harvard Cuban American Undergraduate Student Association (CAUSA), said Garcia brought a different perspective to the debate over Cuba.

“Garcia is someone who is trying to tell a story that hasn’t been told,” he said.

“Harvard hosts a lot of powerful people, but you don’t get Latino males very often,” Serna added.

There were also lighter moments at the reception.

Following a performance by the Din & Tonics, an all-male Harvard a cappella group, Garcia swapped his plaid socks for a pair in the group’s signature lime-green color and posed alongside the singers.

Later, when an audience member asked Garcia what he would do first if he could return to Cuba, he replied: “Dance.”