Néstor Almendros

Néstor Almendros is the son of school teachers. His father, Herminio Almendros (Almansa, Spain), has introduced in Spain the teaching method of Celestin Freinet. After the Spanish civil war, to escape franco, Herminio went into exile in Cuba, where his family will join him in 1948. He was then 18 years old. Since his youth, Nestor displayed a great interest in the arts, but especially for the cinema. In Havana, Néstor wrote film reviews. In Cuba, he obtained a master's degree in Philosophy and Letters, and then he goes to New York to study film at New York City College and finished his studies at the Centro sperimentale in Rome. After the cuban revolution de1959, he returns to Cuba to make documentaries for the castro regime. But after having directed two shorts (Gente en la playa and La tumba fransesca), he is banished from Cuba and moved to Paris. There rencontreFrançois Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, for which he carried out the photography of several films. In 1978, he began his career in Hollywood, where he gets the Oscar for the best photograph for The Harvest of heaven by Terrence Malick. In 1980, he received the César for best picture for his work on The Last Metro by François Truffaut. A few years later, he offers this award to actor and singer Frédéric Norbert in the name of their long friendship. In his later years, Almendros co-directed two documentary films on human rights in Cuba: Bad conduct (on the persecution of homosexuals) and Nadie escuchaba. He participated in several commercials prestigious for Giorgio Armani and Calvin Klein. In 1992, he died of AIDS in New York, at the age of 61 years. Human Rights Watch has given its name to an award given each year to the HRWI Film Festival.