Monthly Archives: September 2013

baseball

A Long Way from Home: The Untold Story of Baseball’s Desegregation

A Long Way From Home will chronicle the struggles of the pioneering African-American and Latino ballplayers who followed Jackie Robinson into white professional baseball, paying particular attention to their experiences in minor-league cities like Little Rock, Savannah, and Mobile, where Jim Crow remained a fact of life well into the 1960s.

As A Long Way From Home will show, the progress of baseball’s desegregation was more  contested—and the actions of those who followed in Robinson’s footsteps, more heroic—than is generally known. Placing this “forgotten fight” to desegregate professional baseball within the larger context of the Civil Rights movement, A Long Way From Home will impart an appreciation for the sacrifices and hard-won victories of men—some famous, some forgotten—who only seemed to be playing a game, when, in fact, they were playing for much more.

Scheduled for release in 2015.

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Ballet with Bullets

The Basque game of jai alai was exported to Cuba in the late 19th century and, from there, to Miami, where its popularity rocketed almost as fast as the balls that flew around the court.

It remains the world’s fastest game — an elegant graceful, and sometimes dangerous “ballet with bullets” that compels players to scale walls to catch up to 180-mph returns. The difference now is, almost no one shows up to watch the action. 

A documentary about what it means to love a game so much you’d risk everything to play it — if only for yourself.

Scheduled for release in late 2013.

 

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Errol Flynn’s Ghost: Hollywood in Havana

Most of the world knows Errol Flynn as the star of such swashbuckling epics as Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, and The Adventures of Robin Hood. But the last chapter of the actor’s life included a real-life adventure far stranger and more improbable than the plot of any film he ever made. In late 1958, Flynn traveled to Cuba as a reporter for the Hearst Press, to cover the advance of Fidel Castro’s rebels on Havana. Flynn not only spent five days with Castro, observing some of the fighting firsthand, but was the only American correspondent with Castro when dictator Fulgencio Batista fled the country on New Year’s Day 1959.

As Errol Flynn’s Ghost will show, this episode in many ways was a fitting climax to mid-20th century Cuba’s obsession with American movies.

In addition to chronicling Flynn’s Cuba adventure, Errol Flynn’s Ghost will travel to the island to uncover Havana’s lost movie palaces and the fascination with American culture they once embodied; from the majestic Payret, located in the center of Old Havana and still functioning as a movie venue (including as one of the main sites for the annual Havana Film Festival) to those which have been appropriated for other uses or long since shuttered, among them, the once splendid Cine Arenal, the Cine Moderno, and the Teatro Los Angeles.

Scheduled for release in 2015.

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Enrique Martinez Celaya: Schneebett

In the summer of 2011, large crates began showing up at the Whale and Star complex we shared with acclaimed artist Enrique Martínez Celaya

The crates contained Schneebett, an installation Martínez Celaya had exhibited at the Berliner Philharmonie in 2004. Inspired by Beethoven’s final days, the work consists of a bronze, life-size sculpture, a painting, a chair, and tree branches. The sculpture is of a bed, and is connected to a cooling unit that produces a blanket of ice on its surface. (“Schneebett” is German for “snow bed.”) 

The work had been donated to the Miami Art Museum by German collector Dieter Rosenkranz and would be the museum’s featured exhibit during one of the biggest weeks on the international art calendar: Art Basel Miami Beach 2011. 

Before it could be shown, however, Schneebett had to be retrofitted with a new cooling system that could stand up to Miami’s hotter temps, not to mention the heat generated by the large crowds that would gather to view this important addition to MAM’s permanent collection. 

Realizing that we had a very small window of time — the retooling would be done over the course of a few short months — we grabbed our cameras and got to work on a documentary chronicling not only the mechanical upgrades, but the ideas that had inspired this significant commission in the career of Martínez Celaya.

The resulting short film, titled Enrique Martínez Celaya: Schneebett, premiered at an invitation-only event at Miami’s “Art Hotel,” The Sagamore, during Art Basel. 

Couldn’t make it that night? You can watch it here.