Oops, we did it again. The opportunity presented to hit the reboot button on friendship with Latin America by the Honduran coup which ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya was a gift to our newly elected President. If he had made all the right moves, he would have created a...

That's how CODEPINK co-founder Jodie Evans introduced Malalai Joya on Thursday, in the U.S. on a book tour for her memoir A Woman Among Warlords. A more telling modifier often describes Malalai Joya as the bravest woman in Afghanistan. After all, is she not the one-time youngest...

I don't know about you, but I have developed a case of chronic whiplash from following the about turns of our 44th president during the health care negotiations.

To think that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid feels that he is within striking distance of the 60...

What's missing from the Health Care debate is an honest assessment of our system of government.

Democracy is defined by the Merriam-Webster online dictionary as "1a: government by the people especially rule of the majority, b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised...

My film premiered Saturday. In the audience were the Cuban Ambassador to the United Nations, his wife and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA). It was amazing and we even had a standing ovation.

Sandra Levinson, from the Center for Cuban Studies in New York City came and sent me a...

Killer lives happily ever after, in Miami of course

In my documentary film, The Man of Two Havanas, my father, Max Lesnik, says, "Miami is like a hell where everything is inverted, murder is characterized as heroic, acts of terrorism as acts of heroism..."

He is referring to Luis Posada...

On another note, the opening of the Tribeca Film Festival, featuring Al Gore, was a testament to what one individual can do with dedication, vision and well... he is pretty brilliant too.
As Martin Scorsese said as he introduced our former president, "Before Al Gore, global warming was an...

For Cinephiles Only:
My documentary, The Man of Two Havanas, is my attempt to understand why my dad always put Cuba and his public life above his family. Well, namely ME.
Well, that's not really all that it is about....
It is also about his friendship with Castro (they made a revolution together), his subsequent breakup and reunion.
Well that's not really all it's about either...
It's also about the fact that I grew up as the daughter of the number one target of the anti-Castro terrorists.
So why a movie? Why not an essay, a magazine article or even a book? Well, simply, because I can.
But wait just a minute. My film idols were never the Maysles Brothers, but rather Antonioni and Bunuel. Their films could not be further from the documentary form. Antonioni, with his cinematic or aesthetic climax, rarely coinciding with the dramatic one; and Bunuel...well, the Bunuel I love is poetry in motion...not at all suited for documentary treatment.
So what is a filmmaker trained at UCLA by Polish genius Jerzy Antczak obsessed with the art of the moving master doing with a camera glued to a tripod in a living room in Miami interviewing her dad?
Well, I'm doing the best I can.
My idea was this: let my father tell his story and see what happens. Not much of a plan. No storyboards, no shot list, no script. Jesus, no script!! What the hell am I doing? When is the director showing up? So this is documentary filmmaking?
After hours and hours of torturing my dad in our living room in Miami and following him around the two Havanas, I had 160 hours of footage and a Final Cut Pro that kept crashing and deleting. But I had a secret weapon: a kickass editor, Tirsa Hackshaw.
As my eyes glazed over watching the endless parade of pictures I had an aha! moment. We need a story to tell this story. We need structure. Oh right, we need a script. Hmm...interesting. But even with all of that there was still something missing.
The missing element was me. I was missing. The time had come to make this massive blob my own, to use all of my skills as well as Antonioni's and Bunuel's and the Maysles' Brothers and Warhol's and any other artist I had devoured, dissected and internalized. Hmmm... The director, working in a great partnership with the editor and a script, and viola, it's a movie!
Well not exactly. Many cuts later, 36 cuts, caffeinated nights and 1 & 1/2 years, something began to take shape. And finally, my movie is complete and ready for its world premiere, not sheltered by the mountains of Utah, but at the Tribeca Film Festival in front of the most film savvy, Film Forum attending, sophisticated and critical audiences in America.
And there's even a moving master, courtesy of archival footage from "I am Cuba" ("Soy Cuba" 1964). And because this blog is for Cinephiles only, I know I don't need to explain the reference.
Wish me luck!

...

One of the contributors in my documentary, The Man of Two Havanas, journalist Ann Louise Bardach ...you may have heard of her, she's on NPR all the time... quotes Einstein as saying: "Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
...