Cuban Roots Bronx Stories

For Third World Newsreel:
Dan Fernandez (212) 947-9277, ext. 305

GRITO PRODUCTIONS, THIRD WORLD NEWSREEL, AND LATINO PUBLIC BROADCASTING PRESENT

The New York Benefit Premiere Screening of

CUBAN ROOTS BRONX STORIES

With Original Musical Score by Oscar Hernández.

Tuesday April 3, 2001 at 7 PM
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue at 2nd Street
$15.00

A moving visual autobiography of 3 Afro-Cuban immigrants who came of age politically and culturally in the 1960s Bronx.

(New York, NY) - Media representations of the Cuban-American community as a conservative, white monolith have rendered Afro-Cuban-Americans "invisible." Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories highlights the historical journey of a black Cuban family, revealing that the Cuban-American experience is more complex racially and ideologically than is popularly understood.

Pablo Elliot Foster, the 24-year-old son of Cuban and Puerto Rican immigrants narrates Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories. After his father returns to Cuba for the first time after 33 years in the US, Pablo decides to explore his own Afro-Latino identity. Pablo's guides on this journey are his father, aunt and uncle, who emigrated from Cuba as children in 1962, shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories is the visual autobiography of one family that confronts questions of diaspora, class, immigration and identity. The layering of archival material, verité footage and the storytellers' memories creates a historical and personal narrative. Its at once personal character and global perspective has cross-cultural relevance and will provoke a re-examining of how we conceive of place, movement and self.

Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories was completed with funding from Latino Public Broadcasting.

Educational Distributors: Third World Newsreel, (212) 947-9277, www.twn.org, and Latin American Video Archives, www.latinamericanvideo.org.

About the Filmmakers

PAM SPORN (Director/Producer) is a Bronx based documentary video maker. Since the late 1980's she has guided New York City teenagers in producing videos that reflect the unique perspective of urban youth. These tapes have won awards and been screened at film and video festivals around the country. Sporn's early work Disobeying Orders: GI Resistance to The Vietnam War (Bronze Apple, National Educational Film/Video Festival, 1989), is distributed by Filmmakers Library. Her short piece, The Point aired on CityArts (WNET/13) in 1998.

DIANA-ELENA MATSOUKAS (Associate Producer) Diana-Elena Matsoukas is a Black Cuban-American whose family immigrated to the United States in the early 1960s. Raised in the Bronx and educated in the New York City public school system, she returned to public education as an early childhood, elementary, and secondary school teacher. During the last 10 years she has been a school administrator and teacher educator on the graduate and undergraduate levels of two teaching institutions. She is currently completing a Ph.D in English Education. Her academic areas of interest are multicultural education, ethnic studies, critical pedagogy, and school reform.

RAFAEL PARRA (Editor) is a Colombian filmmaker who has been working in New York since 1986. He teaches digital editing at Film/Video Arts and at The New School. He edited Radio Taxi Santa Fe and El Séptimo Cielo. He is now editing Sentinels of the World, a documentary about the Popoluca Indians of Mexico.

Upcoming Bronx Premiere of Cuban Roots/Bronx Stories

SATURDAY APRIL 28, 2001 at 7 PM
THE POINT (The Bronx's hottest performance space)
940 Garrison Ave., corner of Manida Street
#6 Train to Hunts Point Ave.

718-542-4139

$10.00 at the door.