Once, maybe twice in a lifetime, you get an idea - a good idea - before anyone else. For a journalist, this can be a make-or-break moment. Act on it, and you find yourself surfing the crest of current events. It might even, as I discovered - be your BIG BREAK INTO THE MOVIES.
So there we were, my husband and I, on a Sunday morning, browsing through the San Francisco Chronicle - when a small article caught our attention. An American sportswriter covering the Pan American games had discovered a functioning Jewish synagogue in the heart of Havana.
Instantly, my husband - a family therapist hatching a second career as a videographer - and I, a journalist with some film making experience and knowledge of Latin America - envisioned the Documentary That Had Never Been Done: The Jews in Cuba.
Imagine the possibilities! Old World Jewish socialists meet New World Latin Communists. Pale emigrants from the shtetl discover sunshine and mambo. Get the pitch? Havana Nagila! In an instant, our lives were changed....
Havana Nagila: The Jews in Cuba, is available on video from the JewishCommunityStore at aol.com. The film makers can be reached at Laurevan at earthlink.net.
[The full text of the article is available at <http://www.folksonline.com/folks/ts/film.htm>.] *****
Cf. <http://www.latinamericanvideo.org/LAVA/titles/detail.cfm?title_id=4657>, <http://www.sfjff.org/cgi-bin/sfjff_resource.pl?titleID=791>, <http://www.sfjff.org/sfjff15/images/havana.jpeg>, <http://www.jewishsf.com/bk950721/etvideo.htm>. -- Yoshie
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>
