Repeating Islands

Andrew Lang’s Sons of Cuba (2009) is a behind-the-scenes look at the Havana Boxing Academy in Cuba. This film, which has been called a riveting, powerful, and uplifting documentary, will be released at cinemas in the United Kingdom on March 19, 2010. The film has already won numerous awards (all in 2009) including Best Documentary at Los Angeles Latin American Film Festival, Best Documentary at Rome Film Festival, Youth Jury Award, Sheffield Doc Fest, Best Documentary, Foundation of New Latin American Cinema, Audience Award, London Latin American Film Festival, and Cuba’s Premio Coral Award for Best Film on Latin America by a non-Latin American. Here are excerpts with a link to the full article below:

Despite being a poverty stricken, isolated island of 11 million, Cuba is the world superpower of amateur boxing. In the past 40 years it has won a staggering 63 Olympic medals in the sport, 32 of them gold. But little was known about how these results were achieved until Andrew Lang and his team became the first film crew ever to be given access to the Havana Boxing Academy. Here, a hand picked group of 10-year old boys rise at 4am, six days a week to begin an excruciating routine of boxing training. Chanting “Victory is our duty! Fatherland or death!” as they shadow box in the dead of night, these are the boys Fidel Castro has called “the standard bearers of the Revolution.”

Laced with emotion, Sons of Cuba is at once intimate, personal and political. It goes deep into the heart and mind of modern Cuba, while documenting, from the inside, a country at a moment of historic change. Sons of Cuba will leave audiences riveted as they both sympathize with the boys’ plight and cheer them on to potential victory.

For full article, see http://www.itzcaribbean.com/film_screenings.php

See Sons of Cuba trailer: