Rewind/Fast Forward Festival

Those quirky kids over at the Florida Moving Image Archive are at it again, throwing the third annual film and video festival that highlights their amazing stash of archival footage. Never call this festival staid. It's always bubbling with the unexpected, from the serious to the comically frivolous. This year for instance, documentaries on the Mariel boatlift and the Weather Underground (reviewed below) reveal themselves to be important and fascinating new additions to our political history, while Creature From the Black Lagoon (in 3-D!) and clips of Popeye and Gumby reveal themselves to be of a, um, cartoonish quality. There will be two different "From the Vaults" screenings: The first includes two government-made films about Castro's Cuba from the early 1960s; the second is travelogues from the post-World War II era, including an Eastern Airlines-produced "docudrama" about how improving our airlines will also improve our security. The big feature this year, shot here and in Havana (archival and new), is the experimental film from Miami's own Mark Boswell, The Subversion Agency (also reviewed below). All screenings will take place from July 10-13 at the Ashe Auditorium in the Knight Center, 200 SE Second Ave.; call 305-375-1505 for more information.

Making Waves

On a recent episode of Law & Order, detectives Briscoe and Green are running down the rap sheet of a potential suspect when they happen across a crucial piece of incriminating evidence: The criminal in question came to the United States on the Mariel boatlift. When one detective makes a puzzled face, the other replies, "You know, Mariel, that time when Castro decided to empty out all the prisons."

Here in Miami we might scoff at such a blunder, but besides the fact that the 1980 exodus brought a huge wave of Cubans to the shores of Key West and Biscayne Bay, forever changing the city's demographic makeup, how much do we really know about Mariel?

"Those of us who are from Miami can remember the images of chaos from the news coverage of that time," admits Lisandro Perez-Rey, filmmaker and creator of the documentary Beyond the Sea (Mas Alla Del Mar), screening as part of the Florida Moving Image Archive's third annual Rewind/Fast Forward film and video festival. "But few people realize the impact Mariel had on Cuba. Mariel was the first and to date one of the only challenges to the revolution from inside the island until now."

Beyond the Sea, most of which takes place in Cuba, reveals through moving narrative and a startling montage of archival footage the extent to which Cuban society turned in on itself and began to self-destruct, after one Cuban bus driver slammed into the Peruvian Embassy on April 4, 1980, and 11,000 people stormed the embassy in search of exile. As Perez-Rey discovered when he began to do research: "I was surprised to find the level of violence and social upheaval during those weeks in 1980 -- people died in the streets. I didn't know to what extent Cuba was turned upside down."

The idea for the film began in 2000 on the twentieth anniversary of Mariel. Perez-Rey began reading about it. At that time his father, Lisandro Perez, director of the Cuban Research Institute at FIU, was doing statistical research on Marielitos as a demographic group. Perez-Rey began to run across several interesting stories and decided they would make a great documentary of one of the most critical events in Cuban and Cuban-American history. It's easy to be bowled over by the sheer magnitude of this exodus -- 130,000 people left in the summer of 1980, and most of them fled in a matter of two months. But what Perez-Rey found intriguing, and what serves as the narrative structure of the film, is the similarities in the tales of those who made the journey: "It was fascinating to piece together the stories and see how these very different people experienced the same, painful odyssey."

The stories come from extensive interviews with Marielitos as diverse as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, an art collector, a convicted prisoner, and a transsexual. From the Peruvian Embassy to the repudiation by neighbors, the violence in the streets, the irrevocable break between family and friends, and the camps in Cuba, these survivors' words reveal how long and arduous this journey truly was, despite the Cuban government's "willingness" to let people leave and the U.S. government's commitment to receive them.

The film insightfully argues that the seeds of Mariel took root in the late Seventies, when over 100,000 Cuban-Americans returned to visit relatives on the island. After twenty years of longing, anger, and separation, these visits set the stage for the upheaval that was to come. Cubans on the island had lived such an isolated existence that when they began to see there was a possibility for another life out there, it changed everything.