Lessons in Process is an experimental documentary about a filmmaking workshop given by Canadian filmmaker/teacher Phil Hoffman, at the famed Internacional de Cine y Televisión, at San Antonio de Los Banos in Cuba. The film is a meditation on generations and legacies that touches on matters of responsibility and participation in the creation and circulation of images. Lessons in Process is at once a celebration of tradition, a self-examination, and an elegy.

The school, as backdrop for the film, was founded in 1986 by Argentinean poet and film maker Fernando Birri, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and Cuban filmmakers Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and was established to give students in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, an opportunity to participate in the democracy of the image. Hoffman collaborates with the students to produce exercises in cinematic process that employ haiku poetry, continuous takes and found footage as a connection to their temporal everyday. Like all of Hoffman's films, serendipity guides the filmmaking process and establishes three weaving threads: the aging Birri and his return to the school, the Haiti earthquake and Hoffman's father's last days.

"What is the right way to teach? What is the right thing to teach? And where do images come from anyway? Lessons in Process explores the legacies we inherit and contribute to as people and as artists." - Brenda Austin-Smith