A jury meeting this Wednesday morning has awarded the 2022 National Film Award to the director and screenwriter Manuel Herrera (Santa Clara, 1942), one of the most outstanding Cuban documentary filmmakers and director of one of the most popular Cuban films of all. the times: Sapphire, blue madness. Herrera is also a renowned television director, in the nineties of the last century he made several chapters of the well-remembered series Día y noche.
From his adolescence he was interested in cinema, and even organized a film club in his hometown in which several experimental films were produced. In 1960 he began working at the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, ICAIC, an institution to which he has devoted most of his working life.
He was assistant director of the immense Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and very soon he began to make his own documentaries. He has written film and television scripts and has published short stories, articles and film reviews in various newspapers and magazines. He has been a professor at the International Film and Television School and at the Faculty of Audiovisual Communication Media at the University of the Arts.
