Balseros (2002)

Directed by

Josep Maria Domènech i Graells, Carles Bosch Arisó

Genre

documentary film

Country

Spain

Runtime

2h

Rating

6.5 of 10 from 16 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This documentary follows seven Cuban refugees from their decision to leave Cuba on homemade rafts in 1994 through their first years in the United States. It shows their daily lives before departure, their dangerous journey, and the challenges they face building new lives after arriving.

intimateobservationalhumanizingmelancholicrawpatienthopefulpoignantgrounded

What happens

Balseros (Spanish: Rafters) is a 2002 Catalan documentary co-directed by Carles Bosch and Josep Maria Domènech about Cubans leaving during the Período Especial. As a consequence of the widespread poverty that came with the end of economic support from the former USSR, 37,191 Cubans left Cuba in 1994, unimpeded by the Cuban government, using anything they could find or build to get to Florida in the United States. Most left with improvised rafts, which were often not seaworthy, and some even hijacked a ferry. The documentary consists largely of interviews with the rafters ("Balseros"), over the course of seven years the lives of seven of those refugees, from the building of their rafts to their attempts at building new lives in the United States, giving insight into daily life in Cuba and the US in those days. The documentary is 2 hours long. The first half is filmed in Cuba, with in the end some scenes of the rafters' months long detention in Guantanamo Bay, where lotteries were used to decide who would be allowed to go to the US. All the while, their families didn't know their whereabouts. The last hour is about the lives of those who got to the USA. These people were filmed again five years later, showing their difficulties adapting to a new type of society and the resulting homesickness, a "human adventure of people who are shipwrecked between two worlds". (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

• Adio Kerida (2002)
• Esclavos vascos del III Reich (2002)
• Al otro lado del Tanganika (2006)
• Los niños del Nepal (2002)
• Umurage (2002)
• Abraham and Eugenia: Stories from Jewish Cuba (1994)
• Cayuco (2007)
• Suite Habana (2003)