#Cuba and the cameraman archive#

MM: When you’re deciding which parts of the footage to use, what sort of things are you looking for? We never thought 35 years ago that one day we’d need it to tell this whole history. We really hunted for that material, but I think it was among the footage that just got so waterlogged we threw it out at the time. I remember everything that we shot in those early days, and I know what we’ve lost. We had a flood ten years into the project. One of the tragedies is that there are some missing parts of that thousand hours that we were hunting for. But because I’ve had this story inside me for decades trying to get out, I sort of feel like an elephant that’s been pregnant for 45 years.īut I’ve made a lot of movies and filmmakers know you spend a lot of time in the editing room. Jon Alpert (JA): Well, it’s hard for someone like me who has a very short attention span.

#Cuba and the cameraman archive#

Alpert spoke with MovieMaker about his film, including how he approached going through those 1,000 hours of footage, working with Netflix, and what Castro meant to him.ĭaniel Joyaux, MovieMaker Magazine (MM): When you decided to make this film, what was it like sifting through an archive of more than 1,000 hours of footage? Cuba and the Cameraman is poised to stand as one of the definitive historical documents of what the lives of Cuban citizens were really like under Castro’s presidency. Alpert has won three duPont-Columbia Awards, he’s received two Academy Awards nominations (both in the documentary short category), and he’s won 16 national Emmys.īut since 1972, Cuba has been Alpert’s first love. Jon Alpert’s film journalism has taken him all over the globe, and he has provided groundbreaking coverage of numerous world-altering events, including the Iran Hostage Crisis, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in China, the Cambodian Genocide, and the Persian Gulf War.

The film, which premiered to enthusiastic reviews at the Venice International Film Festival in September, primarily follows four sets of characters-three Cuban families and Castro himself, whom Alpert was given rare, personal access to from the 1970s all the way until his death. But now, a year after Fidel Castro died at the age of 90, Alpert’s career-spanning passion project is complete.Ĭuba and the Cameraman is culled from more than 1,000 hours of Alpert’s footage over five decades.

1 Comment When documentarian Jon Alpert was first invited to visit Cuba in 1972, he didn’t realize he’d just started a project that would continue (off and on) for the next 45 years of his life.