Every Friday night at 8 p.m. is show time at Cine Martinez—a master bedroom converted into a theatre at the home of Humberto Martinez, B.S. ’75, M.D. ’80, associate professor and director of undergraduate medical education in radiology at the Miller School of Medicine. The lights are dim, the projector is humming, and the beverages rest on movie poster coasters. UM students, faculty, and other guests are rocking in the plush red chairs, vestiges from the old Riviera Theatre on South Dixie Highway. Friday nights have been this way since Martinez was five years old, when his father first gave him a film projector.

“Everything you bought related to technology in Cuba at the time was used equipment from people leaving the country to come to the United States,” Martinez recalls. “Dad got me a new projector every year because once the lamp blew out, there were no replacement bulbs.”

Martinez would raise the curtain—his garage door—and invite the neighborhood kids to watch his silent, black-and-white screenings of Betty Boop, Heckle and Jeckle, and Mighty Mouse cartoons. People’s reactions are what Martinez likes best about film, what he calls “a sharing hobby.” It’s also what Martinez likes best about radiology. “That’s what radiologists do—we gather around and talk about film.”

For Martinez, who left Cuba at the age of 14, the United States was full of opportunity for his hobby. When Kodak invented the Super 8 camera with sound in 1973, Martinez was the first to own one, which he used to make feature-length home movies, complete with a musical score and bilingual narration. While Martinez seemed destined for a career in Hollywood, he knew that medicine was a better fit. In three decades of marriage to Consuelo, B.B.A. 91, he has spent only three nights apart from her, one of which was his initiation into Iron Arrow.

During his undergraduate and medical education, Martinez worked part-time as a projectionist for a company that showed films in Miami Beach hotels. He recalls opening the package for The Jolson Story, describing its beauty like a rare lithograph, but finding it in pieces a few days later. “Film is not a durable medium,” he explains. “I felt like someone had just killed a friend. That’s when I learned to repair and care for film.”

Of all the “friends” Martinez has in his collection today—600 16mm films and more than 1,500 DVDs—his favorite is Sleeping Beauty. Originally released in 1959, it was the last animated film that played in Cuba after Fidel Castro banned all things American. “I was madly in love with Princess Aurora, until I met Princess Consuelo.”

Recipient of numerous teaching awards, Martinez specializes in thoracic imaging. But if you really want to see what gets his heart racing, join him on Fridays at Cine Martinez.

—Meredith Danton