Cuba
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. After Jerónimo’s death, younger Korean Cubans recognize his legacy, but it is not until they are presented with the opportunity to visit South Korea that questions about their mixed identity resurface.
A tale of twin girls, Dóra and Lili, who are born in 1880 Budapest at the same moment Thomas Edison presents his electric lightbulb to the world. The sisters are soon orphaned and separated in childhood, and follow different paths: one grows up to be a naïvely idealistic, bomb-toting anarchist, the other a pampered, hedonistic courtesan. Their paths cross once again on the Orient Express on New Year’s Eve 1899…
Set in 1979, following a young Communist man’s relationship with a gay Catholic writer, exploring tolerance, inclusion, homophobia and challenging its Cuban audience with great humour. Based on the short story by Cuban writer Senel Paz.
Guzmán’s final installment shifts from covering the actions of Allende’s opponents to those who battled to revive & promote their toppled leader’s vision for a new Chile.
The story of an Afro-Cuban group who kept alive songs and dances their ancestor had brought aboard the slave ship from Africa. They were so specific that around 200 years later, a village of Africans watched them, joined in singing, and said simply, joyously: “They Are We”. This film tells the story of how they found each other and how they work to be able to reunite.
Freddy Maemura Hurtado, a second-generation Japanese-Bolivian, heads to Cuba to study medicine. He meets revolutionist Che Guevara. When civil war breaks out in Bolivia, he decides to join Guevara’s revolutionary army under the name of “Ernesto Medico”.
The film tracks legendary swimmer Diana Nyad’s lifetime vision and four harrowing attempts to swim non-stop from Cuba to Florida. An abusive past collides with an obsessive present over a dangerous 60-hour feat never before accomplished.
Driving around the streets of Cuba, Lav Diaz – the famous Filipino director – and Gustavo Flecha – a talkative Cuban taxi driver – find themselves discussing about politics, migration, social conditions and love; touching many personal stories and experiences, they create an historical affresco of the conditions of their own countries.
Four vignettes on the lives of the Cuban people in the pre-revolutionary era. In Havana, Maria is ashamed when a man she loves discovers how she makes a living. Pedro, an old farmer, discovers that the land he cultivates is being sold to an American company. A student sees his friends attacked by the police while they distribute leaflets supporting Fidel Castro. Finally, a peasant family is threatened by Batista’s army.
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. The result is a spectacular compilation of concert footage from the group’s gigs in Amsterdam and New York City’s famed Carnegie Hall, with director Wim Wenders capturing not only the music — but also the musicians’ life stories.
A Russian Literature professor at the University of Havana is ordered to work as a translator for child victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster when they are sent to Cuba for medical treatment. Based on a true story.
Three soldiers moving through the Cuban jungle: combat exercises and camouflage techniques are practised, but the battle never arrives. The nature of their mission becomes an ever-greater mystery, echoing unanswered in the impassive natural surroundings.
Nicholas Quevedo, a Cuban-American rumba singer moves from Havana to New York with nothing else but his love for rumba and his unbreakable dream to make it in the Big Apple, but his journey would be confronted by unimaginable challenges.
In 1996, Cuban bandleader Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, British producer Nick Gold, and American guitarist Ry Cooder convened in Havana to produce a Cuban-Malian collaboration. When the Malians couldn’t get visas, the team turned their attention to reviving a forgotten generation of legendary son cubano musicians and formed an on-the-fly ensemble: the Buena Vista Social Club. Two decades since that fateful first session, we catch up to these master musicians, as they reflect on the magical unfolding of their lives—from humble origins to the evolution and surprising revival of their careers, all against the backdrop of Cuba’s dramatic history. Brimming with unseen concert, rehearsal, and archival footage, this film is an emotional, shimmering celebration of music’s power to transcend age, ideologies, and class, and to connect us to each other through our souls.
Yuli is the nickname given to Carlos Acosta by his father, Pedro, who considers him the son of Ogun, an African god and a fighter. As a child Yuli avoids discipline and education, learning from the streets of an impoverished and abandoned Havana. His father, however, has other ideas, and knowing that his son has a natural talent for dance, sends him to the National Ballet School of Cuba. Despite his repeated escapes and initial poor behaviour, the boy is inevitably drawn to the world of dance, and begins to shape his legendary career from a young age, becoming the first black dancer to be cast in some of the most prestigious ballet roles, originally written for white dancers, in companies such as the Houston Ballet or the Royal Ballet in London.
While Havana is full of zombies hungry for human flesh, official media reported that the disturbances are caused by dissidents paid by the United States. Panic seizes all until Juan comes to the rescue: he discovers he can kill the undead destroying his brain, and decides to start a small business under the slogan “We kill your loved ones.”
At the height of the 1980s AIDS epidemic, Cuban boxing champion Horacio’s punishment for failing a drug test is to watch over the brash, combative Daniel, a patient in a sanatorium where HIV patients are compulsorily confined. The two collide as Daniel yearns for freedom while Horacio dreams of returning to the ring.
At the Palacio, an all-inclusive resort in the carribean, Mike’s arrival complicates the normal flow of operations. His voracious appetite, mysterious magnetism and unexpected miracles bring him the curious, among which he makes three friends and meeets a few admirers, a jealous salsa teacher and an enamored octopus. All of whom will accompany him in a gargantuan downward spiral mixing civil unrest and intestinal meltdown; a change of administration held up by the most attentive staff in the world.
Follows several of Cuba’s top drag racers as they struggle to prepare their classic American cars for the first official car race since the Cuban Revolution. It tells a personal, character-driven story that tackles how Cuba’s recent reforms have affected the lives of these racers and their vibrant community.
When Spanish record producers express interest in Cuban musicians Ruy and Tito, the longtime friends are faced with the prospect of leaving their loved ones behind. After years of hoping and dreaming, they’ve finally earned the opportunity to bring their music to the rest of the world. But are the emotional trade-offs worth it in the end?
Cuba is not a country for young gays. Teen rent boy Reinier falls in love with a mate in the slum soccer field at their neighbourhood in Havana. Although obsessed with moneymaking to hold up his baby, teen wife and wife’s granma, gambler Reinier always fails in getting the stoke of luck he looks for. At the same time he cannot help being infatuated by Yosvani. Handsome Yosvani will give up his wealthy -and elder- girlfriend whom he hooked to pay him a lavish life in the big city, and the works he makes for her father, a loan thug, so much in love he is with Reinier. But the boys would fight hard to keep this love in the reckless Havana streets.
At a rundown bus station in rural Cuba, the line of passengers waiting just keeps getting longer. The problem is that every bus that passes by is already full. Their only hope is to wait for the station’s bus to be fixed. As the disparate group settles in, relationships start forming between the passengers: Emilio, a young engineer, becomes smitten with a beautiful young woman who is en route to meet her Spanish fiancé, a blind man gets support from the others to go to the head of the line. Frustration and disorder reign when the one bus brakes down and no one can leave. Resigned to working together, the group magically transforms the station into a beautiful place where no one wants to leave.
A businessman gets caught up in an assassination plot when he travels to Cuba.
Two young, strong-willed Scottish sisters, one a left-wing activist, the other a most-popular-girl-in-school type, take their late father’s ashes to Cuba, the site of many family legends of his services to the Revolution. Arriving in Havana, the two women promptly lose the ashes and go through a series of misadventrues – both romantic and dangerous – to try to retrieve them. A colourful and wryly humourous tale of cross-cultural misunderstandings and lost illusions.
