"Cuba on the Verge of Change?"07 March 2012Factual60 mins
Cuba is a place of longing. The Caribbean cliché comes to life here: sunlight, music, and a joy of living. Buena Vista Social Club around the clock. A utopia beyond the routines of everyday life, far removed from our efficiency-driven society. Cuba feels like a living open-air museum. Classic cars, old palaces, steam locomotives, and ox-drawn carts. The government seems torn between the need for modernization and the desire to preserve the past, knowing that it is precisely this timeless atmosphere that fascinates tourists. An island from a bygone golden age, one might be tempted—perhaps too hastily—to think.
In this fascinating Oscar-nominated documentary, American guitarist Ry Cooder brings together a group of legendary Cuban folk musicians (some in their 90s) to record a Grammy-winning CD in their native city of Havana.
Half blind and half deaf, ostraziced Cuban writer Rafael Alcides tries to finish his unpublished novels to discover that after several decades, the home made ink from the typewriter he used to write them has faded.
Starting in 1881 this film shows the personal battle between Lenin's Ulyanov family and the royal Romanovs that eventually led to the Russian revolution.
Born to Korean immigrant parents freed from indentured servitude in early twentieth century Mexico, Jerónimo Lim Kim joins the Cuban Revolution with his law school classmate Fidel Castro and becomes an accomplished government official in the Castro regime, until he rediscovers his ethnic roots and dedicates his later life to reconstructing his Korean Cuban identity.
An account of the childhood and youth of the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, and how the hard experiences he lived during these formative years led him to write and publish his first major work when he was only 26 years old.
A disturbing chapter in Russian history is explored in this documentary. In 1933, Joseph Stalin sent 6000 "unwanted" citizens of Moscow and Leningrad to a desolate Siberian island - with no food or clothes to speak of.
Two guys, Nick and Dylan, set out to steal a gigantic diamond buried in the basement of a church. As the duo bumbles their way through their plans, they find that the people they’re trying to dupe are actually what they both need —quirky, chaotic, and imperfect, but loving and lovable… the family they’ve been looking for.
From Boris Karloff to Mel Brooks - Frankenstein has fired the imagination of generations of artists who have created their own interpretation of this Gothic masterpiece.
The story is set some time in the past, or maybe some time in the future. Given a time-frame, we would say somewhere between the American moonwalk, and Coca- Cola's serious ambition to turn the moon into an advertising logo.
Comments
Have you watched Cuba: An Island Out of Time yet? What did you think about it?
