60 years since the Cuban Revolution ended the island’s cinema heyday, only 19 buildings are still used there for that purpose. Some ageing former cinemas are now theatres, some host local dance groups and the majority have been left to a slow and inexorable decline

Most of Cuba’s cinemas were built and managed by American companies such as 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and showed movies produced in both Hollywood and Cinecittà in Rome

After the Cuban Revolution the cost of keeping the cinemas open became an impossible task given the state budget available

Slowly, the structures have either been transformed or abandoned

Sandretto’s journey through Cuba took her around the island three times over the course of four years, during which time she photographed more than 300 cinema buildings using a 1950s medium-format Hasselblad camera

Determining how many cinemas there still were and locating them was initially difficult: there was no information about the cinemas online, and Google is not available in Cuba

One way Sandretto found to circumvent this problem was to find an elderly person in each new city or village and ask them for directions to the cinema

Every time she was surprised by what she found: each cinema building was completely different

More so than in modernised countries, where cinemas have often been erased by progress and change, in Cuba they are signifiers of the huge societal transformations that have occurred in the past 50 years