Balseros
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An Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary, "Balseros" is the heartrending yet triumphant account of seven Cuban refugees - and their families - who risked their lives and beliefs to venture towards America's shores on homemade rafts. The Village Voice raves that "Balseros" is an "engrossing documentary" with an "extraordinary sense of recording stories as they unfold!" While Presidents Clinton and Fidel Castro argued over the closing of Cuba's coast in the chaotic summer of 1994, nearly 50,000 "Balseros" (a slang term for Cuban rafters) set out towards Florida, navigating the shark-infested waters on vessels made of wood, nails, and tar. The television reporting team of Charles Bosch and Joseph M. Domenech began filming this remarkable story over those landmark 15 days. Then, as most of the rafters were picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard, Bosch and Domenech continued to follow their lively cast of characters, some of whom were detained for more than a year at the Guantanamo naval base before finally being allowed onto American soil. Spanning seven years within the complex and utterly fascinating lives of these Cuban survivors, "Balseros" intimately crosscuts out-of-sequence to show family reactions to moments just unfurled. What results is a poignant piece of filmmaking which mirrors the universal spirit, drama and adventure of the immigrant experience.
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