Gutiérrez Alea wrote and directed more than twenty features, documentaries, and short films, which are known for his sharp insight into post-Revolutionary Cuba, and possess a delicate balance between dedication to the revolution and criticism of the social, economic, and political conditions of the country.
After receiving his law degree from the University of Havana in 1951, Gutiérrez studied cinema at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, graduating in 1953.
Shortly after the success of the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959, Gutiérrez, Espinosa, and several other young filmmakers founded the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC).
As ardent supporters of the Revolution, ICAIC was a filmmaker's collective which believed film to be the most important modern art form and the best medium to distribute revolutionary thought to the masses.
[3] Gutiérrez's first widely successful feature, Muerte de un burócrata (Death of a Bureaucrat) (1966) introduces itself as a sort of homage to the history of cinematic comedy, and includes direct allusions to the work of Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, Luis Buñuel, and many others.
The story follows a young man's confounding plight through bureaucratic offices to have his dead uncle exhumed and then reburied after the body is buried with his identification card.
Based on Edmundo Desnoes’s novella "Inconsolable Memories," the film is the memoir of a morally ambiguous bourgeois intellectual living in Havana in the period between the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Memories makes use of various types of media including direct documentary footage shot, still photos, archive and newsreel footage, clips of Hollywood films, and recorded speeches by Fidel Castro and John F. Kennedy, to create a seemingly disarticulated film language that is in direct contrast to the straightforward Hollywood style.
In 1972 and 1976, respectively, Gutiérrez completed two historical feature films, Una pelea cubana contra los demonios (A Cuban Fight Against the Demons) and La última cena (The Last Supper).