Here is the english translation
Bailarinas y boxedores: relatos de dos orillas
TOWED MIGUEL To
Especial/El Nuevo Herald
Posted on Fri, Oct. 08, 2004
Long and complex history of the relations between Havana and the Florida data of more than four centuries. But one of the most painful chapters of this saga between the two borders has been place in the last 50 years old. Boxers and Ballerinas is new a documentary one that talks about, like so many others, to a little while of this specific period, only that their producers have tried to contribute an unpublished perspective to the socio-political hank that serves as bottom drop curtain these relations.
The film follows the passages two boxers and two dancers—in Havana and others in Miami—whose common place is their youth and its hopes. Mike Cahill, of 24 years; Brit Marling, of 21, and Nick Schumaker, of 25—the people in charge of the documentary one—emphasizes with effectiveness, intelligence and without commitments, the triumphs, faints and battles whom they have to free these four young people in his respective realities, united by his cultural inheritance and divided by 90 miles of water and more than 40 years of political conflicts.
’ ’ He would be irresponsible to ignore the history of the relations between Cuba and Florida, but he would be equally irresponsible to portray that history like which he is present of permanent way in the mind of all youth in North America’, Cahill explains, that with its equipment lived by more than half year in Cuba to obtain more than 400 hours of filmic material.
According to the director, history is a complex animal for a young person, and if reflected of clear and concise way the risk is not run of which it is not understood or that it does not interest. ’ For much people of our age, history is something chaotic, noisy, confused and outside perspective. And, in the specific case of the relations between Cuba and the United States, they exist too many narrators generally and, or are in war, or they have too much rage. With this documentary one we wanted to give a voice to those young people whose histories have been extinguished by ` histories of historians, by the conflicts and violence’. It is why Brit Marling assures that this one is not films on Cuban for Cuban, but a experience that approaches subjects of extreme universality.
`` Tratamos to explore powerful concepts of life that each human being has in common: family, violence, patriotism, success, money, love, terrorism, freedom and, mainly, the power and vulnerability of the dreams. Those things to which we dedicated a life to try to understand them, to evaluate them or to define them, especially when he is young’‘.
The narrative style of Boxers and Ballerinas is very different from the typical documentary one. The rate of the edition is extremely dynamic and the photography plays with angles that are compatible to the youth of any site of the world, exposed to the games of video, very to the Real World, of MTV. ’ ’ Imagine a camera hides and follows the personages for months and months, filming everything what they do; a camera that does not interact with them because it is to the other side of the street, in a car, a balcony, behind a window, that records the sound through a remote control cable that the personages put themselves in the mornings and that everything registers: their conversations, interactions, discharges and losses, relationships’‘, explains Cahill.
Described as ’ ‘The film on young people done by young people’‘, the producers present/display a space in the life of Yordenis Ugas, a Havanan boxer of 17 years, and Annia Ismarlin, a classic dancer of 19. The point of view, in the case of those of the island, emphasizes that the talent is the key to stay immune to the battles that free others in Cuba by the subsistence. The appraised dream more: to travel, something that the producers learned that it was a luxury for any Cuban. ’ ’ the Cubans Are very few that can leave the island so that the athletes and the artists are people who do not have to mount in a raft, they have the opportunity to leave and to return to his place’‘, explains Cahill.
(continued next post)
