CIFF 38 Review: Here Was Cuba, Marmato
The second Thursday of the Cleveland International Film Festival started a stretch of five consecutive documentaries over three days.
As I was writing this up, it occurred to me that when I was picking out my films I could have checked on IMDB to see how well they were rated. Adding this to my film picking tactics might have saved me the pain of seeing Salvo, but then I see that that terrible film was rated (as of this writing) at 6.5/10 on 244 votes, which is hardly low enough to flat out reject something. There are also as many perfect 10 ratings are there are 1, 2 and 3 ratings. Clearly ignoring IMDB is the way to go.
Anyway, here are the films from Thursday:
Here Was Cuba
John F. Kennedy is often overrated because he was good looking and had his brains sprayed all over his car on film. However, the documentary Here Was Cuba shows that if nothing else he deserves massive amounts of credit for NOT pulling the nuclear trigger when virtually every one of his advisers said it was time to go to war. At one point the Russians shot down a spy plane over Cuba (which I didn't know), and even JFK's most doveish advisers we're ready to invade and risk nuclear conflagration, but somehow he resisted them. How much strength does it take to listen to an entire room full of very smart people who are all saying the same thing, and then to do something else because you think they are wrong?
That wasn't the only way the world got lucky back in 1962. Several Soviet submarines that were escorting freighters full of weaponry to Cuba were armed with nuclear tipped torpedoes, and none of their captains pulled the trigger, even the U.S. blockade was dropping depth charges on them. One was even forced to the surface, and in the words of a junior officer who is interviewed "after the captain tried to communicate with light messages and got no response, he got fed up and ordered the torpedo armed. However, one of the other men on the conning tower had trouble getting down the ladder, and in the few seconds that took the U.S. surface units responded, and the captain calmed down." If that man doesn't slip, a bunch of U.S. ships get nuked, and then the balloon goes up.
Obviously 50 years on most of the principles are dead, but Here Was Cuba has a wide range of interviews with American, Russians and Cubans at all levels, ranging from Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorenson (died 2010) to assorted Russian officers who were station in Cuba or on naval units, to Khrushchev's son, to the American officer who analyzed the spy photographs of Cuba.
The visual style relies on a lot of documentary footage, modern day interviews, and in a particularly chilling manner, modern day footage of some of the places where events took place, like D.C. and Havana. The juxtaposition of audio recordings of the JFK's conversations with his advisers with kids playing in the streets of Havana or in a playground in D.C. is particularly disturbing. All in all, I was happy to rate this as 'EXCELLENT'.
Marmato
I sat in jumpinfool's Mogul reserved seats for Marmato, which was my obligatory "all corporations are evil" documentary of the CIFF, following in the tracks of such films as Musicwood, Bananas!* and assorted others over the years. I don't know if this genre reoccurs because filmmakers are overwhelming politically liberal, or if there is just no shortage of evil corporations.
In any event, this film covers seven years in the town of Marmoto, Colombia, which rests on a mountain that has the largest known reserve of gold in the entire world. Miners have used comparatively primitive techniques to extract gold for the past 500 years. Naturally, a big Canadian corporation wants to move in and use modern strip mining techniques to get the gold out faster. Of course, this means leveling them mountain, forcibly moving all the villagers and leaving what will in all likelihood be a ecological disaster behind, but hey, the gold's not doing much good under the mountain, is it?
The corporation buys up most of the small local mines. The remaining mines keep working, but then the Colombian government bans selling dynamite to small companies in a blatant rule change to force those mines out of business. The miners are now unemployed. However, they decide to break into the padlocked mines and keep working, but now keeping the gold for themselves.
As you can imagine, this does not go over well. The police are called in. The miners set up roadblocks. Unions and miners in other cities march in solidarity. Negotiations happen. And in the final scenes from the movie, the riot police movie in with orders to clear them by force.
This is an abrupt ending, and there is no post-script to give any clarity. The director (who is a gringo) was there for a Q&A, and he explained that he was basically told that if he didn't leave Colombia he would probably end up in prison on trumped up charges for a long time, so he decided it was time to leave. He was able to tell us that for the first in the history of Colombia's elite riot police, the police lost. The miners fought back and kicked them out of town, and the status quo of "corporation owns the mines, but the miners are working illegally" is still going on.
The film is enthralling, but without the director's Q&A it would have been immensely unsatisfying. I cannot rate this better than 'GOOD' because of that.
As I was writing this up, it occurred to me that when I was picking out my films I could have checked on IMDB to see how well they were rated. Adding this to my film picking tactics might have saved me the pain of seeing Salvo, but then I see that that terrible film was rated (as of this writing) at 6.5/10 on 244 votes, which is hardly low enough to flat out reject something. There are also as many perfect 10 ratings are there are 1, 2 and 3 ratings. Clearly ignoring IMDB is the way to go.
Anyway, here are the films from Thursday:
Here Was Cuba
John F. Kennedy is often overrated because he was good looking and had his brains sprayed all over his car on film. However, the documentary Here Was Cuba shows that if nothing else he deserves massive amounts of credit for NOT pulling the nuclear trigger when virtually every one of his advisers said it was time to go to war. At one point the Russians shot down a spy plane over Cuba (which I didn't know), and even JFK's most doveish advisers we're ready to invade and risk nuclear conflagration, but somehow he resisted them. How much strength does it take to listen to an entire room full of very smart people who are all saying the same thing, and then to do something else because you think they are wrong?
That wasn't the only way the world got lucky back in 1962. Several Soviet submarines that were escorting freighters full of weaponry to Cuba were armed with nuclear tipped torpedoes, and none of their captains pulled the trigger, even the U.S. blockade was dropping depth charges on them. One was even forced to the surface, and in the words of a junior officer who is interviewed "after the captain tried to communicate with light messages and got no response, he got fed up and ordered the torpedo armed. However, one of the other men on the conning tower had trouble getting down the ladder, and in the few seconds that took the U.S. surface units responded, and the captain calmed down." If that man doesn't slip, a bunch of U.S. ships get nuked, and then the balloon goes up.
Obviously 50 years on most of the principles are dead, but Here Was Cuba has a wide range of interviews with American, Russians and Cubans at all levels, ranging from Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorenson (died 2010) to assorted Russian officers who were station in Cuba or on naval units, to Khrushchev's son, to the American officer who analyzed the spy photographs of Cuba.
The visual style relies on a lot of documentary footage, modern day interviews, and in a particularly chilling manner, modern day footage of some of the places where events took place, like D.C. and Havana. The juxtaposition of audio recordings of the JFK's conversations with his advisers with kids playing in the streets of Havana or in a playground in D.C. is particularly disturbing. All in all, I was happy to rate this as 'EXCELLENT'.
Marmato
I sat in jumpinfool's Mogul reserved seats for Marmato, which was my obligatory "all corporations are evil" documentary of the CIFF, following in the tracks of such films as Musicwood, Bananas!* and assorted others over the years. I don't know if this genre reoccurs because filmmakers are overwhelming politically liberal, or if there is just no shortage of evil corporations.
In any event, this film covers seven years in the town of Marmoto, Colombia, which rests on a mountain that has the largest known reserve of gold in the entire world. Miners have used comparatively primitive techniques to extract gold for the past 500 years. Naturally, a big Canadian corporation wants to move in and use modern strip mining techniques to get the gold out faster. Of course, this means leveling them mountain, forcibly moving all the villagers and leaving what will in all likelihood be a ecological disaster behind, but hey, the gold's not doing much good under the mountain, is it?
The corporation buys up most of the small local mines. The remaining mines keep working, but then the Colombian government bans selling dynamite to small companies in a blatant rule change to force those mines out of business. The miners are now unemployed. However, they decide to break into the padlocked mines and keep working, but now keeping the gold for themselves.
As you can imagine, this does not go over well. The police are called in. The miners set up roadblocks. Unions and miners in other cities march in solidarity. Negotiations happen. And in the final scenes from the movie, the riot police movie in with orders to clear them by force.
This is an abrupt ending, and there is no post-script to give any clarity. The director (who is a gringo) was there for a Q&A, and he explained that he was basically told that if he didn't leave Colombia he would probably end up in prison on trumped up charges for a long time, so he decided it was time to leave. He was able to tell us that for the first in the history of Colombia's elite riot police, the police lost. The miners fought back and kicked them out of town, and the status quo of "corporation owns the mines, but the miners are working illegally" is still going on.
The film is enthralling, but without the director's Q&A it would have been immensely unsatisfying. I cannot rate this better than 'GOOD' because of that.