TOMÁS GUTIÉRREZ ALEA (11th Dec 1928 - 17th April 1996)
Cuba's greatest and best-known director, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea fell in love with cinema at an early age. After graduating from college, Alea journeyed to Italy to study film directing at the famed Centro Sperimentale de Cinematografia in Rome. He returned to Cuba in 1953 and joined the radical “Nuestro Tiempo” cultural society, becoming active in the film section. Soon after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Alea co-founded the national revolutionary film institute ICAIC “Instituto del Arte y Industria Cinematografica”. Whilst his beginnings were in documentary, influenced by Italian neorealism, he fully came into his own as an artist during Fidel Castro's regime and he continued to produce satirical (Las Doce Sillas - The Twelve Chairs), Hollywoodesque (Muerte de un burócrata – Death of a Bureaucrat) and controversial (Los Sobrevivientes - The Survivors/Fresa y chocolate – Strawberry & Chocolate: the first Cuban film to receive an Oscar nomination) and the dramatic (Memorias del subdesarrollo – Memories) films until his death in 1996.

On his mother-in-law's deathbed, Hippolito learns that to avoid their confiscation during the revolution, she hid her jewellery in one of the twelve English chairs that formerly stood in the blue salon of her villa. Seeing an opportunity to make some easy money, Hippolito wastes no time to go in search of them. The villa itself is now a retirement home and after running into Oscar, one of the villa's former servants, they join forces to search, but to no avail. Unknown to them, however, his mother-in-law had also confided the secret to someone else...