Making a “Beautiful” Film in Revolutionary Cuba
Posted on www.VidaAfroLatina.com on November 25, 2008

Within the elite, cloistered environment of Yale University, students from diverse economic and cultural backgrounds came together to form a collective based on our passionate concerns about racial inequality. As outcasts, we became intrigued by the revolutionary mystique of Cuba and its contentious relationship with the United States. After overcoming financial and political obstacles, we misfits took the field trip of a lifetime to the blockaded island.

The documentary film, “Beautiful Me(s): Finding Our Revolutionary Selves in Black Cuba,” is our intimate travel diary as underdog graduate students who journey from the Ivy League to the rebel state of Cuba.

“Beautiful Me(s)” was initially filmed by our group during our May 2002 trip to Cuba. Calling ourselves the Black Resistance Reading Group, our collective had met regularly for over a year to engage scholarly and creative texts about anti-racist politics and culture in the African Diaspora. Our discussions led us to consider taking a field trip to Cuba to see these ideas in action. We raised the funds for the trip by organizing a series of events and soliciting support from a variety of organizations and academic departments on campus.

In the streets of Havana and Santiago, we witnessed extraordinary hip hop, reggae and rumba performances and struck up conversations with Cubans from all walks of life. Our group was welcomed into a raucous block party with hundreds of people in an integrated neighborhood. Behind a cultural curtain created by political conflict, we discovered that Cuban people feel a close affinity with Africans and African Americans, and are deeply committed to ending racial injustice. The Cuban people we encountered are driven more by their principles of unity and independence than by any individual leader or doctrine.

We were inspired to film our experiences, so we borrowed video cameras, which we taught ourselves to use, and collected more than 25 hours of footage of encounters with Cuban intellectuals, musicians and everyday people on the streets of Havana and Santiago.
 
Four years late, as a lecturer Williams College, I designed a course at about race and the guerilla tradition of Third Cinema. The Third Cinema style of filmmaking emerged from social movements in Latin America in the late 1960s. It embraces film and filmmaking as an effective tool for empowering communities of color throughout the world by democratizing the technical expertise and funding required to make films. In addition, this style encourages people of color and other members of historically marginalized groups to create work that articulates the experiences, desires and needs of their own communities, for their own communities.

No one was designated as the director of “Beautiful Me(s)” from the outset. By the time I arrived at Williams in 2005, I was the only member of our group still working on the film project. I became the director through the resources I invested in completing the project. I worked with a diverse group of Williams undergraduates to complete the film: editing on school-owned equipment until dawn and traveling to Dartmouth College, Yale University and Harlem for follow-up interviews and additional footage.

The way this documentary was made parallels the empowering message of “Beautiful Me(s).” Its production embodies the gritty spirit of Third Cinema filmmaking and sheds light on how fresh perspectives may be incorporated into the increasingly popular documentary film genre. The youth involved in making this film created opportunities to cross boundaries and found our own voices in the process.

The film has been enthusiastically received by audiences throughout the country. Frequently during question and answer sessions, audience members comment that they are inspired and moved by how the travelers worked together to form an anti-racist community and how the Cuban people we encountered were committed to creating a just society. My hope is that young people, students and teachers, as well as all of us who are concerned about the brutality of racism, will be encouraged by “Beautiful Me(s)” to find their own revolutionary selves by building community, taking action and become optimistic about the possibilities of change.

Robin J. Hayes has held residential fellowships at Williams College and Northwestern University and received support for her work from the Ford Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education. She is a professor of ethnic studies and political science at Santa Clara University in California. For more information or to arrange a screening, visit www.beautifulmes.com.