New York’s MoMA Brings Traveling Exhibition of Documentary Shorts to Cuba
March 21, 2012 by guest
HAVANA, Cuba, Mar 21 (acn) ‘Closing Distances’, a U.S. documentary shorts program organized by the New York-based Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will begin on Sunday, March 25th, a tour around several Cuban cities.
The traveling exhibition is organized by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator at MoMA, and Alexandra Halkin, Director of the Americas Media Initiative,a non-profit organization based in Burlington, Vermont, that works with Cuban filmmakers, while the Cuban counterpart providing the logistical support is the Havana-based Young Directors Film Festival (Muestra Joven).
The documentary shorts included in the exhibition will be screened in the cities of Cienfuegos, Gibara, Holguin, and Camaguey, before they are presented at the end of the tour at the Young Directors Film Festival in Havana.
According to the Americas Media Initiative, the goal of Closing Distances/Cerrando Distancias is to screen a selection of U.S. documentary short films that present unique and diverse local U.S. experiences to a wide Cuban audience and, through cultural exchange, to increase understanding and foster dialogue between U.S. and Cuban citizens.
The exhibition is made up of four documentary short films and one animation short.
Two of the documentaries are Sara Neeson’s ‘Poster Girl’ (2010), about a young female American vet sent to Iraq who suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, and Gail Dolgin and Robin Fryday’s ‘The Barber of Birmingham’ (2011), about 85-year-old James Armstrong, a foot soldier in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Both films were nominated for Academy Awards in the Documentary Shorts category.
Other films in the program are Jesse Epstein’s ‘Wet Dreams’ and ‘False Images’, a Sundance award-winning documentary, and Anthony Weeks’s ‘Housekeeping’, about a migrant hotel housekeeper’s meditation on her life and the lives and habits of the people for whom she works.
‘Miss Devine’, directed by the Rauch Brothers, is the short animation included in the program.
The Americas Media Initiative—Cuba Media Project is a new organization focused on the distribution of Cuban independent and community media in the United States.
