The Indie Scene on PBS. July 17, 2000.
P.O.V.: Our House in Havana
Airdate: Tuesday, July 25, 2000 at 9:00 p.m. ET (Check local listings)
Cuban history, memories, and lingering class divisions come into sharp focus when Silvia Morini, after nearly 40 years in the United States, sets out to revisit the palatial home of her youth in Havana, Cuba.
Silvia's emotionally charged memories of the life of privilege led by Cuba's pre-Revolutionary elite, include neighbors and servants from the warm glow of earlier times. But when she encounters some of the family's former servants, their recollections and points of view evoke a reality
profoundly at odds with the one to which she had steadfastly clung.
Silvia persists in looking for what remains of a lost world of high culture, debutante balls, and yacht clubs. Against the backdrop of today's lively but impoverished Cuba, Silvia wanders through Havana, encountering working-class Cubans of her own generation, still proud of the revolution's
gains and fearful of its reversals, along with restive, younger Cubans seeking a future not frozen by the politics of the past.
Back in the U.S., Silvia Morini, daughter of a sugar plantation owner, undergoes a dramatic change of heart, reversing her decades-old "pro blockade" political stance. She emerges as a social activist, lobbying Jesse Helms' office to end the U.S. blockade, and ultimately becoming, as
she puts it, "more human."
Underwriters:
John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, PBS, Florence & John Schumann Foundation, and the National Endowment of the Arts. Funding for Talking Back is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Cast/Crew:
Producer/Director: Stephen Olsson
Co-Producer: Carolyn Zaff
Editor: Stephen Olsson
Cinematographer: Stephen Olsson
Sound: Maite Rivera Carbonell
Filmmaker Biography:
Veteran documentary producer/director Stephen Olsson is perhaps best known for 1992's Last Images of War (co-produced with Scott Andrews), which won a National Emmy Award for Outstanding Director and was aired on P.O.V., and for School Color (also made with Andrews) which earned an Alfred I. du
Pont - Columbia University award for excellence in broadcast journalism and aired on PBS's Frontline series. Both films received numerous other awards and broadcasts around the world.
Olsson's other credits include Afghanistan: The Fight for a Way of Life, John Collier: A Visual Journey, and the ethnographic documentaries, To Find the Baruya Story and Her Name Came on Arrows. He has also produced many feature reports for television networks in the U.S. and Europe.
Olsson holds an M.A. in Communications and Anthropology from Temple University, and has taught documentary filmmaking in over a dozen countries.
On The Web:
For more information on OUR HOUSE IN HAVANA, visit www.pbs.org/pov/pov2000/havana.html. |