Sara Gómez was a Cuban filmmaker. Brought up in a middle-class black family in Havana, she studied literature, piano and Afro-Cuban ethnography. She worked as a journalist before joining the newly-formed Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) in 1961, where she subsequently served as assistant director to Jorge Fraga and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, as well as to the visiting French director Agnès Varda. One of only two black filmmakers at ICAIC at the time, and for several years its only woman director, Gómez made a series of documentary shorts on assigned topics before directing her first feature. Gómez's last film, the 1974 hybrid narrative/documentary De cierta manera, which was completed posthumously by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Julio García Espinosa, has been hailed as the "first movie to truly explore conflicting threads of racial and gender identity within a revolutionary context," with noted Cuban film scholar Michael Chanan observing that the film is "an aesthetically radical film...mix[ing]...fiction and documentary, in the most original way...by using real people to play themselves alongside professional actors.” She died at the age of 31 due to an asthma attack.