“Cuba hits you,” explain Rosanna Webster and Phoebe Henry, the directorial duo behind this new film: “it is a complete sensory overload.” Fast-paced and evocative, the artist and filmmaker assemble a ‘cross-section’ of their journey across an island anchored at the confluence of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean sea, between sweltering heat and tropical storm. 

“It is chaotic, colorful, unapologetically loud and in your face,” the directors continue, with breathless adjectives: “The culture has a tempo and a pace that gets under your skin.” The filmmaking pair traveled to Cuba to capture the country while it “teeters on the cusp of a huge shift,” as they explain. What became apparent was the physicality of the place, with life “spilling out onto the streets, refreshingly open and warm.”

This new visual essay accelerates down wild roads, careening through the streets of Havana, matching Webster and Henry’s aesthetic intuition—born from their work in fashion—with its own break-neck pace. With echoes of 1964's sensorial and deeply photogenic I am Cuba, A Portrait of Cuba conjures its own visceral hymn to a nation stepping through the 21st century. Unlike the monochrome of the earlier work, Webster and Henry’s cinematic poem bursts with richness and uncontrollable color.