On Dec. 23rd, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik wrote about a documentary film focussed on Cuba, featuring a local LPCer, Mica Jarmel-Schneider. It makes for very interesting reading, given the recent news about the U.S. and Cubas warming relations. Check out Havana Curveball if it comes to your area. Here is the article: Ken Schneider, who with his wife, Marcia Jarmel, made the documentary “Havana Curveball,” happened to be in Cuba last Wednesday when the news came that Obama would work to lift the embargo that has separated our country from its neighbor for so many years. Ironically, the story told in the documentary, about the couple’s young son Mica’s bar mitzvah humanitarian project — providing baseball equipment for young people in Havana — was a story of difficulties created by the embargo. Schneider was in Havana to show the movie, which has been seen at film festivals around this country, at the Festival del Nuevo Cinema Latinoamericano. Cubans’ reactions to the president’s announcement “was remarkable,” said Schneider. “I didn’t see huge celebrations on the street, but what I saw, and felt, which was palpable, was like a ray of optimism. Every Cuban I talked to — drivers, friends, people in cafes — everyone said, It feels like nothing we’ve felt before.’ Most people in Cuba have not experienced the possibilities that anything could change.” Talking with people in Havana, said Schneider, “I’m in a cafe, I’m in the street, I’m in a car. The old cars fill up, with up to five people. When I would step in, there would already be a conversation going.” They were talking about the announcement. When Schneider “first heard the news, I was in a cafe with a friend. Raul Castro was on TV, then a few minutes later, Obama was describing the prisoner exchange. People were excited by the strength of his speech, that it wasn’t an incremental change. It was the big deal. They understood there that it was not a symbolic gesture.” That Wednesday night, there was a private screening of “Havana Curveball” at the U.S. Interests Section, “put up in front of a group of filmmakers, directors, actors, community leaders.” Schneider introduced the movie, saying, in Spanish, it was “for the change.” “And people cheered. There were tears, people were very emotional. Some of it was the film, but some of it was for the moment. How incredible that the movie would play in Havana at that moment. It was the perfect storm.” “Havana Curveball” will show at the New Parkway in Oakland on Feb. 3, then spend a week at the Vogue in San Francisco, from Feb. 8 to 12.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 01:08:11 +0000
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