Madagascar (1994) is a Cuban film that marked Fernando Pérez's change of direction into a more lyrical approach to filmmaking, somehow stripped from the realistic documentary feel of his early work.
The film chronicles the relationship and lack of communication between a mother and daughter during the Cuban economic crisis known as the Special Period.
The production and post-production of director Fernando Pérez's third fiction film was completed in September 1993 to await the preparation of the work's other two parts: 'Melodrama' ("Melodrama," dir.
The three directors had worked together to develop their ideas for the creation of the project, but in the end, according to Pérez, the films wound up lacking the necessary continuity necessary to bind them together.
During December 1994, over one year after the completion of its post-production, Madagascar first appeared in Cuba's theatres as part of the annual New Latin American Film Festival held in Havana.
The story chronicles the relationship between the narrator, who is a single mother and pragmatic middle-aged professor of physics, and her moody adolescent daughter.
During the opening sequence, we learn that Laura's life has entered into a mysterious psychological crisis, exacerbated by her daughter's extreme behavior.
In an early scene, Laurita informs her mother that she has grown tired of school and will be taking a break from her studies in order to travel to Madagascar.
The lack of chemicals on the island after 1991 forced Madagascar’s production unit to mail all of their negatives to a lab in Venezuela, making "dailies," or the practice of reviewing each day's shooting and then re-filming whatever did not turn out as planned, impossible.