Cuba and the Cameraman (2017)
★★★½ — Cuba and the Cameraman (2017)
Sometimes the best discoveries come out of necessity. I was working my way through my A-Z World Movie Tour, Cuba was the destination, and the pickings were pretty slim when it came to fiction features. So I landed on a documentary. And honestly? It turned out to be one of the best viewing decisions I've made in a long time.
Cuba and the Cameraman follows journalist and filmmaker Jon Alpert across roughly four decades of visits to the island, returning again and again to the same ordinary Cuban families to see how their lives were unfolding. That simple, patient premise is what makes it so extraordinary. This isn't a film built on talking heads, stock footage and political commentary shouted over each other. It's something far more intimate than that. It's about people. Real people, captured across the span of their lives, on camera, with a man who clearly genuinely cared about them.
And that's the thing that gets you. The connections Alpert builds with his subjects feel completely authentic. You can see it in the way they welcome him back, the way they open up to him, the way time passes across their faces between visits. There's no performance here, no sense that anyone is playing to a political script. These are families just trying to get on with it, living through seismic historical shifts that most of us only ever read about in textbooks. Watching their circumstances change, sometimes heartbreakingly so, across those forty-odd years carries a weight that no amount of narration or political analysis could manufacture.
Some of what the film reveals is genuinely shocking. There are moments where the reality of life under the Castro government lands hard, where the gap between official rhetoric and lived experience becomes impossible to ignore. But the film earns those moments because it never goes looking for them with an agenda. Alpert lets the truth surface naturally, through the stories of the people he's sitting with. It's thought-provoking in the way that only patient, long-form documentary filmmaking can be.
It reminded me in spirit of Island Soldier, another documentary I caught around this time that takes a similarly personal, human-scale approach to a story that could easily have been reduced to geopolitics. Both films understand that the best way into a big, complicated subject is through the door of individual lives.
If I'm being honest about where Cuba and the Cameraman sits in the landscape of great political documentaries, it's right up there. The scope of it, four decades of access to the same families, is something most filmmakers would never have the patience or persistence to pull off. Alpert clearly did. And the result is a film that feels warm and human even when the facts it presents are uncomfortable. That's a difficult balance to strike, and he manages it consistently.
Four stars. Well worth your time, even if, like me, you stumble across it by accident.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2025-06-08
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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