Latineos - Latin America, Caribbean, arts, culture

British filmmaker Andrew Lang worked for three years in the making of Sons of Cuba, his first film. The film premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in the US in April 2009, and had its European Premiere at the Rome International Film Festival, where it won the prize for the Best Documentary. Since then, it has been shown in festivals throughout the world and has collected many awards. It was released theatrically in the UK in March 2010. Sons of Cuba’s DVD is now ready to be launched and we profited from this occasion to have a conversation with the filmmaker.

Your relation with Latin America and with documentary film started more or less at the same time, right?
I studied Spanish at Edinburgh University and then, as part of the course, I spent the third year out of university living in Chile. During that time I discovered Patricio Guzmán, the Chilean documentary maker, and I wrote my thesis on his film La Batalla de Chile. While doing that I found out about New Latin American Cinema and then decided to go and study in the School of New Latin American Cinema in Cuba.

That was a three week course with a Cuban director called Octavio Cortázar and during that time I met some of the people that ended up being my crew on Sons of Cuba: the producers, the cinematographer and the sound recordist. Actually, I ended up working with a completely Cuban crew; I was the only foreigner.

Cuban documentary making is actually quite different from the kind of documentary filmmaking in the rest of the world because, at least in the school, they work with a big crew, they still use lights and they set up every shot. It is a very constructed and formal, almost quite old-fashioned way of making documentary, whereas the British and American ways are especially observational and a lot quicker: just start the camera and shoot. Observational documentaries barely exist in Cuba, really, and I think part of the reason is just because there is so little money and resources. People can’t afford to shoot 50 tapes or 50 cards to make a film. Even though I worked with an experienced crew, I really had to teach them what observational documentary was and I think they were quite surprised that we were filming real life without setting it up.

You worked with Domingo Triana Machín, a well-known and experienced Cuban cinematographer. Can you tell us what he brought to the film?
He is well in his 70s now. He started of as an assistant on Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, a seminal Latin American film directed by the Cuban Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, in 1968) and he works with the film school now and in television in Cuba.

He had a very classical approach. He is an amazing lighter. He uses lights beautifully, so what he brought to the film was the opening scene where the kids are training in

the dark. That was all lit with lights, because normally it would be completely black at the training ground. So he brought in all these lights and made all these beautiful shots. But he didn’t know so much about observational stuff and I ended up shooting that because it was easier for me just to do it myself than to be constantly telling him what shot I wanted. We ended up shooting about half of the film each, and somehow you can’t quite tell the two styles. You don’t really notice so much.

This brings us to the editing of the film, which I find nicely paced and balanced…
It kind of all melded quite well and we had a great editor as well. What I learned from that film regarding the camera work, especially in documentary, is that all the shots don’t have to be beautiful. But if you just put in a few shots throughout the film that are really beautiful, people tend to say “Oh, there’s amazing cinematography”. We also had a really good grade of the colour correction in London. We worked with the senior colourist, who does a lot of feature films, and I was really amazed by how much difference that made. A really good grade takes it to the next level.

Boxing is a very kinetic sport and I suppose that filming boxing matches requires a highly technical skill. How did you learn to predict the movements and place the camera in the right spot?
We made lots of experiments because we were filming boxing matches throughout the season. We experimented with different camera positions and we found out that the best approach was to have one kind of master shot right back showing the whole room and then a second camera in one corner, just shooting close ups. And then there is a third camera, which is always outside the ring, filming all the reactions of the parents, the coaches and that sort of thing.

Mothers and motherland, is this one of the central themes of the film?
It is really a big theme of the film, these father-son relationships and mother-son relationships. All the kids say that they are doing it for the country and for their mothers, which is very moving.

Exactly. Through all the film you think, “are they doing this for themselves or is it mostly for somebody else?”
There is a mixture of motives. I think one motive is just being someone in a country were a lot of the emphasis is in all being the same. It is a product of communism that people do not stand out too much, so I think sport in Cuba is one of the few ways where you can really be someone.  And I think they are very motivated by their parents as well. They have all witnessed their parents suffering, or the parents mentioned that the children witnessed them suffering. So I think there’s a kind web of reasons why they are doing it, which is quite complex.

The film portrays a boxing academy for children, but their routine resembles a military regime. Sport is shown as something extremely serious for Cubans, a big source of national pride…
When you start studying the whole basis of sport in Cuba, you find that straight after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in the early sixties Castro was making speeches about the need to develop the sports program, and there are several reasons for that. He said it will make people more positive of Cuba’s pride, he also said it makes population fitter and more able to defend the country if they are invaded. He also says that what they spend in sports they save in medicine, so there is a whole range of reasons why sport is important in Cuba. And on a cynical level, it is purely to show that Cuba is better than the capitalistic countries. But actually, it is not a strange concept. If you look what is happening in countries like Britain, the United States and Australia recently, they are doing what the communist countries used to do: using sport as means of nation building and demonstrating power.

My favourite scene in the film is when Cristian visits his father. You can foresee his future through his father’s present, like something unavoidable. It is very powerful…
I think that is my favourite scene as well. That is the really emotional part of the whole film. What you get a lot in Cuba is people of a certain age who have put a lot of energy and their whole lives into this Revolution and have really been let down at a certain level. Yet still they have this kind of loyalty to the country. Luis Felipe really represents that in the film and his son is at an

age where the penny hasn’t quite dropped. If he follows in his father’s footsteps and he achieves everything his father achieved, he can end like his father, living in abject poverty. So that scene works on many levels. You wonder whether Christian will go down that route or whether he will choose to defect and try to make some money from all his hard work.

As seen in your film, reactions towards defectors are implacable…
Filming the coach reacting to that incident was probably the most tense shoot of the whole film, because you are asking someone to comment about something that they really don’t feel comfortable talking about, particularly in front of a camera. The official line in Cuba when a sportsman defects is “they are traitors” and they simply never speak about it again. The pictures are taken off, they are not mentioned on the television, they just disappear.

The kids, being that young age, very much follow that line, “they are traitors” and so on. In terms of the coach it was a bit more complex. He was probably saying things he felt compelled to say. The boxer who defected was actually a close friend of his and I think he didn’t agree with the fact that he had defected but he probably wouldn’t have gone so far as to call him a traitor in private conversation. That’s probably the one part of the film where there was a slight difference between truth and reality, maybe.

You were very lucky, as a filmmaker, to be there with your camera when Fidel announced his retirement. Did you expect such a thing to happen?
It was always the aim for this film that it wouldn’t be just a film about boxing and it wouldn’t just be a competition documentary where you get excited about which kid is going to win and which one is going to lose. The aim with the film was always to look at present day Cuba through boxing and when the whole thing with Fidel falling ill happened, that obviously presented a great opportunity to get into wider politics.

How was the reaction to the film when it premiered in Cuba?
We went to the Havana Film Festival to present the film for the first time and that was only last December. It was just an amazing experience. We didn’t show the film to anyone until that screening. The boys, who are now two years older, came and everyone loved it. They all came back for the second screening. The film won two prizes: the best film by a non Latin-American director and the ‘Asociación del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano’ gave it the Best Documentary Award. It was on the Cuban film critics’ list of the top ten films of the year. They said they were going to release it in Cuban cinemas but since then things have stopped and we don’t really know what’s happening. I think they might be nervous about some of the more sensitive political contents, talking about defectors and things like that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t actually make it to Cuban cinemas because of that.

Did you notice big changes in Havana when you returned for the festival?
I noticed that the situation in Havana was worse than ever in terms of people’s disillusion. When Fidel fell ill I think people hoped that there might be some improvement in their lives and there wasn’t. When Raúl took power officially, some months later, people again hoped that there might be improvement in their lives and there wasn’t. When Obama came into power people hoped that there might be improvement in their lives and there wasn’t, and I think now there’s just this terribly oppressive feeling. It’s just like complete lack of progress. I have never seen Havana looking so depressed.

What are your new projects, after Sons of Cuba?
I am about to start making a film in Africa about a big issue, but I can't go into details yet. You will have to wait and see!