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(I was at a press screening for this and was a bit put off even though
Jon Alpert is obviously a supporter of the revolution. For some reason,
he profiled a number of fairly apolitical Cubans who he developed a
friendship with. Their attitudes toward changes in Cuba are lacking in
any kind of insight about the historical process even though they have a
human interest aspect that Alpert emphasized. After things turn bad in
the "special period", they react as most ordinary Cubans do--some
becoming American immigrants. In any case, it is definitely watching on
Netflix later this month. If I wrote a review, I'd be tempted to call it
"rotten" but didn't see any point in that.)
Netflix’s */CUBA AND THE CAMERAMAN/*, directed by multiple-Emmy
award-winning and Academy Award-nominated documentarian Jon Alpert,
captures life in Cuba over the course of _45 YEARS_, from the country’s
cautious optimism during the early 1970s, to the harrowing 1990s after
the fall of the Soviet Union, to the death of Fidel Castro last year. In
the film, which premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Alpert
focuses on three Cuban families and their growth and struggle throughout
the decades. He was also astonishingly able to obtain unprecedented
access to Castro himself, exposing a more intimate side of Castro never
before seen by the public.
*Watch the film’s new trailer **HERE* <https://youtu.be/lsZ8hDutkeM>*. *
*SYNOPSIS |*Since 1959, when Fidel Castro ascended to power in the
revolution that marked an era, no one had ever gone as deep inside Cuba
as Jon Alpert (/Baghdad ER/, /China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of
Sichuan Province/). The multiple-Emmy award-winning and Academy
Award-nominated documentarian began filming in Castro’s Cuba in 1972,
having become fascinated with the country, its people, and its culture
years earlier. Alpert brought along a small crew and a portable camera,
beginning a fascinating, intimate, decades-long chronicle of the
Communist country that was 90 miles off the coast of Florida, a longtime
political foe, but a mystery to much of the world.
Compiled from more than a thousand hours of footage and filmed over 45
years, Alpert follows three families and Fidel Castro. He was there for
Cuba’s optimistic socialism of the early ’70s, and for the 1980 Mariel
Bay boatlift, when over 100,000 Cubans fled the island accompanied by
inmates released from prisons and insane asylums. He returned to cover
the hardships of the 1990s; the harrowing “Special Period” after the
fall of the Soviet Union, when Cuba literally went dark. He documented
how these families and the Cuban leader dealt with the serious
challenges gripping their country.
Among the revelations in the Netflix original documentary */CUBA AND THE
CAMERAMAN/* is Castro himself – unguarded, off-the-cuff, and unedited.
In their numerous on-camera interviews, the cigar-chomping revolutionary
affectionately called the straight-shooting Alpert “The Journalist,” and
showed a side of himself never seen publicly. Alpert was one of the last
Americans to see Castro before his death.
*Run time:*113 minutes
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