The Coming and Going of the Trains

This project proposes the study and preservation of the film Prijodiat y ujodiat poezda (The Coming and Going of the Trains), made by Rosina Prado in 1961, during her studies at the VGIK (All-Russian State University of Cinematography, Soviet Union). A screening copy of the film was deposited by the filmmaker at the Filmoteca Española and is in a state of active degradation, awaiting restoration. The action proposes research on the filmmaker and her relationship with the Moscow film school, and the preservation of the only copy of her first film work thought to have survived.

Rosina Prado was born in Cartagena (Spain) in 1935 and went into exile with her family in the Soviet Union at the end of the Spanish Civil War, in 1939. From 1955 to 1961 she studied Film Direction at the VGIK, where one of her tutors was Aleksandr Dovzhenko, and made the film The Coming and Going of the Trains. In 1961 she interrupted her studies and migrated to Cuba with her parents and her baby. From then until 1967, she worked as a director at the film studios of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), in the Film Dissemination Department (1961-1963) and the 35mm Documentaries Department (1964-1967). There she made the documentary short films that make up the rest of her filmography: Ismaelillo (1962), Palmas cubanas (1963), ¿Qué es lo bello? (1965), La llamada del nido (1966) and El zoológico (1968). All these documentaries were shot in black and white on 35mm film apart from El zoológico, which was shot in Orwocolor. In 1968, she began to work on a new documentary, Reportaje sobre Cabo Cruz, but filming was suspended due to a hurricane. Rosina Prado never made another film. After working for many years as a film critic for the newspaper España republicana, published in Havana by the community of Spanish exiles, and as a civil servant for the Cuban government, she returned to Spain in 1977. Her status as a female filmmaker and exiled anti-fascist contributed to her being erased from the history of cinema, and she therefore remains a little-known filmmaker whose documentaries were scarcely seen after their initial screening in Cuban cinemas.

The research on Rosina Prado and her relationship with the Film School in Moscow includes working with primary sources in multilingual collections and the reconstruction of the story of the making of The Coming and Going of the Trains −placing it in the context of film education in the Soviet Union−, her contribution to documentary film from the perspective of her status as an exiled anti-fascist, and her subsequent participation in the development of socialist film culture in Cuba, where she migrated in 1961.

Lead Researchers:

Sonia García López, Carolina Cappa

Students C08:
Alexandre Kröner Moreira, Nita Kruger Hidalgo, Noemí Susel Legón

Associated researcher:

Masha Salazkina 

Associated institutions:

Filmoteca Española, University Institute of Spanish Cinema (UC3M)

Timeframe:

New creation