Boston Film Festival revels in a first
Boston Film Festival revels in a first
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Boston Film Festival
A scene from the film “No Greater Love.”
By Loren King Globe Correspondent September 05, 2015
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Even “The Godfather II” didn’t get to shoot its famous Havana scenes in Cuba. The Dominican Republic and other locations had to suffice.
Times have changed. “Papa,” which opens the 31st annual Boston Film Festival on Sept. 17, is reportedly the first Hollywood dramatic feature film allowed to shoot in Cuba since the 1959 revolution and subsequent US embargo.
Papa” stars Giovanni Ribisi as Ed Myers, a character based on the real-life Miami Herald reporter Denne Bart Petitclerc, who wrote the script. Petitclerc, who died in 2006, also wrote the screenplay for “Islands in the Stream” (1977), based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel. “Papa” is about the friendship between the reporter and Hemingway (Adrian Sparks), who lived in Cuba from 1939 to 1960 and wrote some of his best-known works there, including his Pulitzer Prize-winner, “The Old Man and the Sea.” Myers visits Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary (Joely Richardson), also a journalist, at their Cuba estate in the late ’50s as the Fidel Castro-led revolution is brewing. At Hemingway’s urging, Myers files firsthand reports of the tumultuous events redefining life on the island.
Director Bob Yari and his crew got unprecedented permission to shoot inside Hemingway’s former estate, Finca Vigia, and at some of Havana’s most iconic sites, including the former Government Palace, which was long ago turned into a museum commemorating Castro’s revolution. The Grand Theater, closed for restoration, was converted into the bar of one of Hemingway’s favorite spots, the Ambos Mundos Hotel. It’s here that, in the film, notorious mobster Santo Trafficante (James Remar) tips off Myers that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover is spying on Hemingway.
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