Cuba and the Cameraman (2017)
★★★½ — Cuba and the Cameraman (2017)
Jon Alpert is a New York-based documentary filmmaker and NBC cameraman who first travelled to Cuba in 1972, at a time when American access to the island was tightly restricted and relations between the two countries were defined by Cold War hostility. Over the following four-plus decades, he returned repeatedly, building an unusual personal rapport with Fidel Castro himself and following three ordinary Cuban families through revolution, the Soviet collapse, the Special Period of economic hardship in the 1990s, and into the twenty-first century. The resulting film, released on Netflix in 2017 (shortly after Castro's death in late 2016), is less a polished commission than a personal archive project, assembled from decades of footage that no major broadcaster had been willing to air in full.
A-Z World Movie Tour Cuba I didn't have much choice in the way of movies so I had to settle for a documentary. Boy am I glad I chose this. What a fantastic, insightful and real documentary. Filmed over about 40 years Jon Alpert visited Cuba and interviewed the same group of real people to document how their lives changed throughout the years. The connections were genuine. The people were sweet and welcoming. The facts were shocking in places and thought provoking in others. Well worth the watch.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2025-06-08
Where to watch (UK)
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK
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