Filmmaker, Andrew Lang, one could say, was destined to make his feature debut, Sons of Cuba.  His relationship with the island, and eventual journey to making his gorgeous nonfiction film, developed through a variety of serendipitous events. He was never really interested in film when he was young, he says, until his high school Spanish teacher “stuck a tape in the VCR to shut us up at the end of a lesson.”  The film shown was The Battle of Chile by Patricio Guzmán, an observational documentary that spans the build-up to Salvador Allende’s election in 1970 to Pinochet’s CIA-backed coup d’etat in September of 1973.  Lang says that he had “never seen anything like it, and from that point on, I was thinking about making documentaries.” Four years later in 2002, he visited Chile, finding that Guzmán’s films were still banned from being shown there.  (He managed to track down some bootleg copies, which were left for him in a shoebox at an underground station.) When he returned to school two years later to do his Spanish thesis, he did it on Guzmán.  While researching New Latin American Cinema, a 1960s Cuba-based movement that aimed to put cinema “in service to” the Revolution, Lang discovered that Columbian writer, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and Fidel Castro had built a New Latin American Film School in Havana.  He promptly set his sights on getting there as soon as he was able.

Sons of Cuba is set in the legendary Havana Boxing Academy, a boarding school that handpicks 9-year-old boys and trains them to be the best boxers in the world, the results of which have been extraordinary since Cuba has dominated Olympic boxing for the last 25 years.  But along with this athletic prowess comes a responsibility to be seen as symbols of the country itself, “the standard bearers of the Revolution.”

Lang treats this particular time in Cuban history, when so much is about to change, with a light touch.  But he does make it abundantly clear that he is filming what will turn out to be the last generation of young people that have Fidel as their “Commandante.” There are these subtle cues throughout the film about the delicate state of Cuban politics and the island’s relationship with the States that are handled with consummate grace—all the more impressive since it’s become such a clunky issue, at least from a US perspective.  It was very apparent that this was important; however, Lang doesn’t let anything overshadow the intimate images and voices of his protagonists and their families.

The film world- premiered at 2009’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, followed by a discussion moderated by Steve James.  On opening night.  Not too shabby for someone’s first feature.

Here’s our conversation on more of Sons of Cuba’s genesis and Lang’s sojourn in Castro’s country. Like Kim Longinotto, Heddy Honigmann, and other great documentarians of the human spirit, Andrew Lang is a director that does not shy away from deep emotionalism—in his subject matter, in his cinematography and choice of score, and, particularly, from the boys who open their hearts to his camera.

Andrew Lang in Cuba

Getting Started

SP: Tell me a bit of background for this ambitious project and anticipating, and meeting, the challenges of filming in Cuba? How did you put everything in place to get rolling, and how did your core crew come together?

Andrew Lang (AL): Before leaving the UK in 2005, I read an article in The [London] Times about the prowess of Cuban boxers (who have dominated world amateur boxing for the last 40 years). When asked why they were so good, double Olympic Champion Mario Kindelan replied: “Cubans are fighters in all walks of life. Ours is a small country, but we live to fight.” I immediately had the idea of making a film that looked at the fight of Cuban society through the fight of one of its boxers. When I finished my short course at the Cuban film school, I stayed in Havana and began to look for a boxer to follow. Initially, I thought about maybe a 17-year-old about to break into the national team, but then one day I found myself at four in the morning standing on a training ground as all around me twenty-five 11-year-old boys shadow-boxed whilst chanting “Victory is our duty. Defeat has no justification.” It was a no-brainer; I would make a film about these kids.

At this stage I was still only planning on making a short (10 minutes or so). I wanted to work with the same group of Cubans for whom I’d worked at the film school, and shoot for three days. But my budget wouldn’t even stretch to that.  By this stage I was nearing the moment when I would have to fly to Mexico before boarding the same plane back to Havana, as my visa had expired. Just before leaving, my Cuban flatmate told me: “If you really want to fund your film, buy some Puma T-shirts whilst you’re in Mexico. I’ll sell them for you on the streets. You can’t buy designer labels in the stores here. We’ll make some money.” I returned with 25 Puma t-shirts, we sold them, and the short was funded.

SP: Brilliant, well done.

AL: I returned to England in January 2006 and edited my 10-minute short. But even before I had finished cutting it, the idea of following the boys through an entire 8-month season was knocking on the door. Without any idea what I was letting myself in for, I decided to make a feature. I got hold of the EDN [European Documentary Network] handbook of commissioning editors [representatives of a broadcast television station or strand who buy documentaries] and a thoroughly fruitless round of mailing out proposals and DVDs followed. Time was fast running out before the boxing season was due to start in Cuba, and I figured that I had just weeks to either get the film funded or start thinking about giving up. The very last commissioning editor I sent the proposal to was Stephen Segaller at WNET. He liked the idea so much, that despite the fact that I had never made a film, they funded three-quarters of it, and helped me secure funding from ARTE and ITVS for the remainder. The total budget was around £220,000 [approximately US $328,000]. There was only one problem: they wanted a 45-minute narrated TV program. I vowed to make their version and then use my salary to continue shooting and make the feature. This ended up taking a further two years.

Throughout all of my time trying to raise money in the UK, I had been in close contact with my Cuban producers. We had shot our three-day short film semi-clandestinely, but the same would not be possible if we were going to be following the story over several months. We wanted to shoot observationally and freely in the boys boxing academy, but to our knowledge the state had never permitted observational shooting in one of its institutions. Reams of government approvals were needed, and it wasn’t until right at the start of the shoot that we were able to persuade them not to send a minder [Cuban government representative] with us at all times. Central to the plan was to work with a completely Cuban crew. I would be the only foreigner, and would also gain residency in Cuba. This brought with it the unnerving add-on of having to ask the Cuban government for permission each time I wanted to leave the country. There were a lot of hoops to jump through, but it was worth the effort. When Castro fell ill several months later, the country entered a state of heightened alert. We heard of two foreign documentary crews being expelled immediately. The reason our shoot was allowed to continue was quite simply that it was considered a Cuban production by the authorities, and not a foreign one.

Story Development

SP: How long were you filming or around your subjects before finding your main protagonists, specifically, the three boys, Santos, Cristian and Junior and how much dramaturgical work was done in pre-production? In other words, did you have a distinct story structure in mind before you began?

The reason I ask is that there is amazing editorial foresight in the way things were shot–you have some scenes where you have coverage as a narrative film would, cameras set just so to record some very specific action that brings us, an an audience, to a level of intimacy with the subjects that is just fantastic.  We just float along effortlessly, assured that we are in the hands of an extremely proficient storyteller.  The whole film is extremely graceful in its execution.  I know there are happy accidents that occur constantly when you’re shooting a doc, but this goes beyond serendipity; it spills over into intuition with a good bit of artistry thrown in.

AL: Twenty-three 11 year-old boys, all Afro-Cuban, all from similar backgrounds, all with dreams of one day becoming Olympic champions. How to choose three? For the first few weeks, my Cuban producer Dania [Ilisastigui Aviles] and I spent many hours at the Academy watching the boys, trying to work out their characters, and trying to predict whose stories would eventually become dramatic once the pressure of the competition season set in. When we started filming, we had a short list of ten. About three weeks later we ended up with five, whom I followed to the end of the season. In the edit we lost one immediately, and a further one after the first round of rough cuts. This left us with the three that eventually appear in the film.

In terms of the dramaturgical work, I knew from the start that the climax of the film would be Cuba’s national boxing championship for Under 12s. I kind of split up the film into three acts in my mind. Act 1 would set up the importance of sport within the Cuban Revolution, the role of the boxing academy in producing champions, and provide an introduction to each of the three characters. I knew that Act 2 would feature a mixture of more constructed scenes featuring the kids at home with their families, and purely observational scenes in the academy. One of the hard things was working out how, what we referred to as, “the Castro subplot” would fit in with our main plot of the boys and their dreams of becoming national champions. Castro fell ill and dramatically ceded power near the start of our shoot, and there are several scenes where we see the boys, and Cuba as a whole, reacting to life without him for the first time in 48 years. How to meld these scenes with the main plot was something we mainly discovered in the edit. I think when talking about the very tight structure and strong emotional punch of the film, I have to take my hat off to Simon Rose, the editor. We cut this film for seven months and he did an extraordinary job.

We really mixed shooting styles in the film. Some scenes, like the one near the start of the film where the boys train under floodlights, were highly constructed. There were no lights ordinarily on their training ground, so we had to bring them in for the scene. At other times, cameras would be set up to capture a moment in the political calendar that we knew was about to happen, for example, the first military parade without Fidel or the 50^th anniversary of the start of the Revolution. There was a third style of shooting in which we set up scenes to produce a piece of reality, like when Cristian goes to see his father, the forgotten boxing champion, and they look through an album of photos of his career. With these kinds of scenes I was particularly influenced by Patricio Guzmán, who does this sort of thing a lot, for example in The Obstinate Memory, where the director hires a band to walk through the streets of Santiago playing the theme tune of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular. For 27 years of the Pinochet dictatorship no one had dared play this music, and Guzmán films the shocked faces of the public as they hear it again for the first time. That kind of thing is totally constructed, yet it creates a level of truth that goes beyond anything you could capture through direct cinema. I’m very attracted to that intersect between documentary and fiction and I’m sure there’s a lot of uncharted territory waiting to be discovered.

Getting Ready for Production

SP: We just glossed over this a bit in the beginning, but would you go into some detail about your funding structure for us–first money in, executive producers, etc.?  What do you think the strongest impetus was for people to put money into the project considering this is a first feature?

How long was the proposed shoot—or was it open-ended?  Were you prepared to invest as much time as possible to get the story, or did you have any time constraints, self-imposed or otherwise?

AL: When I returned from my first trip to Cuba with my 10-minute trailer I attended a course run by Rachel Wexler on how to raise money for feature docs. There I met Mandy Chang, who offered to produce the film with me. We decided to work through Windfall Films because we’re both big fans of David Dugan, the chairman. Being my first film, I think it was important for PBS and ARTE to know that we had an established production company and an experienced exec behind the project. I think that the most exciting thing to both broadcasters was definitely the access. I made it quite clear in pitching the film that this level of access had never been allowed by any Cuban institution and that, combined with a really strong, well-shot trailer, was what made them take a leap of faith on a director with no experience.

The budget for the TV version was £220,000 and to then expand that to a feature cost about another £60,000 of hard cash costs [approximately US $89,500], plus at least another £100,000 of deferred salaries and services [US $149,000]. For this finishing leg of the project we brought in a second production company, Trinamite Productions, and we raised the extra cash through equity investments.

My first trip to Cuba, where I shot the trailer, lasted four months. The main shoot in 2007 was about seven months long, and there was a subsequent one-month trip in 2008.  For my next film, I’d like not to have to follow a process over such a long period of time. I agree with Werner Herzog that, most of the time, films should be made quickly.

SP: Do you think you might turn your camera back on these boys at some point in the future?

AL: I’m definitely keeping an eye on their lives with a view to an update. It would be incredible if one of those kids were to make it to the Olympics, or even, dare I say it, defect and become professional.

The Shoot

SP: What was it like shooting in Cuba?  Everyone is quite comfortable in front of your camera; there’s an accepted intimacy there that is palpable.  The personality of the Cuban people is such that they happen to be incredibly open and warm and welcoming, unafraid of showing a great depth of emotion–it really is a filmmaker’s dream to shoot there.  How did your suppositions about what you would find differ from the realities of shooting there?  Lastly, did you expect to have so much crying going on?

AL: Shooting in Cuba is incredibly hard work. There was recently a show of Cuban music videos in London and one of the directors quipped: “Making a three minute music video in Cuba is as much work as making a feature anywhere else in the world,” and I thought, “I know what you’re talking about.” There are the attentions of the authorities, the huge amount of bureaucracy, the fact that many of the cast and crew do not have phones at home, the almost complete lack of computers and the Internet, the power and water cuts, the transport which always breaks down. All these things seem to slow down the best laid plans immeasurably. The only thing to do is to go with the flow, shrug, and say as the Cubans do: “Bueno, estamos en Cuba.” (“After all, we’re in Cuba.”)

The extraordinary intimacy we were able to capture both in observational scenes and in interviews was down to several things. Firstly, I think that Cubans, as a people, are, indeed, very open and warm, unafraid of showing a great depth of emotion. Secondly, we got to know these people extremely well. All of my Cuban crew were really personable individuals and cast and crew formed very close bonds. It went far beyond the making of the film: if one of the boys was having problems at school, or someone’s mother needed a lift somewhere to run an errand, we’d often be the first port of call. That kind of family atmosphere definitely comes through on camera.

SP: Yes, quite often—that was really wonderful to see.

AL: One of the things that seems to most surprise audiences is the amount of crying there is on camera. At the Full Frame Q&A one of the members of the audience said, “I don’t think I have ever seen a film in which so many men cry!” I certainly can’t think of one. But why is that? I think that, in this particular atmosphere, emotion is very near to the surface. On an obvious level, you have young kids being pushed to their mental and physical limits. But on a less obvious level, I would say that this is a society that demands enormous sacrifice of its people. The whole rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution is one of resistance, whatever the cost. “We’ll go back to living in caves before giving into Imperialism,” as Fidel famously said. This is something everyone has to subscribe to, whether they agree with the ideology behind it or not. It has caused hunger, family separation, even in some cases death when you look at the fate of some of the balseros who try to escape by sea. I think that when people make such huge sacrifices it’s natural to want to feel that it has been worth it. But in the case of Cuba, it is far from certain that it has been.

Look at the case of Yosvani, the boxing coach—he is a model citizen, faithful to the ideology in every way. Yet his salary is not even enough to buy him a bus ride to and from work every day for a month. He is producing the next generation of Cuban boxers, at the same time as those boys’ heroes are defecting from the national team and denouncing the Cuban sports system from Miami. Of course someone in his position is going to become emotional once you start probing whether his huge sacrifice, his life’s work, is really worth it. He’s done everything the system has asked of him, and yet has he done the right thing with his life? I think all the adults featured in the film share this melancholy for that reason. The most obvious, of course, is Cristian’s father, the champion boxer who has given everything to his country, yet is forgotten and living in abject poverty.

Tools and Techniques

SP: The cinematography is so beautiful–there is much attention paid to aesthetics and capturing the beauty of the sport, the beauty of the island and the beauty of the people.  What did you shoot on and why was that camera chosen?  How much forethought did you put into sound design and music?  Were you aware of staying away from clichéd ideas of what people’s perceptions of Cuba are, or what their life is like?  What was important for you to capture in terms of color and light to offset the emotionalism of your subjects, and how did you accomplish that?

AL: We shot the film on the Sony z1 since that seemed the best video camera available at the time. One of the main shooting challenges was low light at the academy and also at the subjects’ homes. We spent a considerable amount of time replacing light fixtures at the academy, as we didn’t want to have to set up lights every time we visited. I also velcroed small fluro lights to the top and bottom of the camera’s matte box, which helped bring up the close-ups in the boys’ dorm. We also hung rechargeable fluro lights on the walls in the dorm each time we visited. For scenes shot in their homes we often lit using cinema lights. Shooting the four a.m. training was a major lighting operation, requiring six large Soviet cinema lights. We used these same lights to illuminate the areas the boys fought in at the national championship. Generally we had just one camera and a crew of four (camera /director, sound, producer, driver). But for tournaments we’d have three cameras (two in the ring and one filming reactions outside the ring). On these occasions our crew would grow considerably. I think we were twelve for the national championship, as there were also extra gaffers, sound recordists and production assistants.

People have made some nice comments about the cinematography and I think that the first thing to say about that is that Cuba helps you a lot in this respect. There is this crumbling beauty and a lot of faded Caribbean colours that make so much of what you film look instantly appealing. But I also think that the melding of cinematic styles worked well for us. There is quite ordinary observational doc combined with some quite stylized camerawork. I think if I shoot another observational documentary, I’d try to do the same thing. It seems you only need to sprinkle a few of these “cinematic” shots into the film to considerably raise the aesthetic level of the whole work. Once you’ve done that, people seem to almost forget the places where the camera work is more ordinary.  Also, it’s incredibly important to use a really top end [color] grade if you are making a film for the big screen. I had thought about trying to save money by grading on an Avid, but I’m so glad I didn’t. We had Molinare’s senior colourist, Gareth Spensley, and he really took our material to the next level. It was a real revelation to me.

Getting It Seen

SP: Did you have a distribution and marketing scenario in place as far back as pre-production?  Obviously, you were going for a theatrical experience with this film; it’s made for the cinema. Beyond the festival circuit, what are your roll-out plans for theatrical, broadcast, DVD, and other platforms of outreach and distribution in terms of how you’re going to reach your audience? Knowing the challenges of getting a film out into the world, how are you differentiating the film from everything else in the marketplace and what do you think the challenges are in marketing a theatrical documentary versus a fiction film, if any?

AL: The film was shot, edited and graded to be as cinematic as possible. We also mixed in 5.1 (surround) to give as theatrical an experience as possible. I’d like to see the film have a long festival run over the next couple of years, as well as doing some theatrical in the UK, USA and Spain. As well as mainstream festivals, I’d really like to see the film play at festivals all over Latin America, where Cuba is, of course, a particular fascination. But the festival we’re most looking forward to is the Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana in December.

SP: Full circle.

AL: Yes, bringing the film home to Cuba will be a great moment. Cubans watch films like no other nation I’ve ever encountered, shouting across the theatre at the screen and at one another as the story develops, exchanging opinions very publicly. I can’t wait to see how the Cuban public reacts. A proper theatrical release in Cuba is not out of the question, but it depends on whether the authorities consider the film too negative in its portrayal of Cuban life, in particular, the portrayal of Christian’s father, the retired boxer, which may be a problem. I hope that this is not the case. It seems that there is a certain opening happening in Cuban cinema right now.

We think that Sons of Cuba definitely has a theatrical life; it has so many target audiences.  There are the two million Cubans living in exile; the 3.5 million Americans it is estimated will rush to book holidays to Cuba the moment the travel ban is lifted; boxing fans; students of Latin American studies and/or socialism / communism; the list goes on. We’re planning a really ambitious Web-outreach plan to reach as many of these people as possible. It will be interesting to see what happens.

If you want to be kept up to date with information about public screenings, DVD availability, and news of the boys from Havana, sign up on the mailing list at www.sonsofcuba.com.

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