By ken eisner
Publish Date: 10-Aug-2006
With Los Zafiros: Music From the Edge of Time, director Lorenzo DeStefano tracked down the enigmatic ‘60s Havana band known as “the Beatles of Cuba”.
Lorenzo DeStefano spent about five years tracking down the convoluted story of the band known to fans of Latin American music as “the Beatles of Cuba”. But if the Pender Island resident were to begin that journey today, it’s not clear if he would even be able to make the film, called Los Zafiros: Music From the Edge of Time, which will play August 18-22 at the Vancouver Film Centre‘s Vancity Theatre.
“I had never heard of the band in all my trips to Cuba, since 1993,” DeStefano recalls in a phone call from Los Angeles. “But I ran into the record Bossa Cubana in New York, got hooked, and then found out that two of the guys were still alive. That’s how it is with being a filmmaker; you become fascinated with something and it becomes your life. Next thing you know, you are Mr. Zafiros.”
The reason Los Zafiros has such hypnotic power is found in their basic sound, a rich stew of high harmonies, American soul singing from the Sam Cooke era, and slinky guitar from Manuel Galban, who has lately been recording with Ry Cooder. (The Cadillac fins on the cover of the Grammy-winning Mambo Insinuendo, their 2004 album, tells much of the story.)
DeStefano, who has worked as an editor, producer, and director on American TV shows—most notably on four seasons of Life Goes On—already went the music-doc route 25 years ago with Talmage Farlow, an incisive portrait of the late jazz guitarist of the same name, and this PBS effort helped him get Zafiros off the ground. Eventually, he found Galban in Havana, playing with the Buena Vista Social Club crowd; the band’s other surviving member, Miguel Cancio, turned up in Miami.
The film mixes their recollections with terrific archival footage and thoughts from colleagues and ordinary Cubans.
“I needed their permission,” he says of the living Zafiros, “or else there would be no movie.”
As it happens, there had already been a Cuban feature film, called Locura Azul, based on the band’s story. But it reflected certain divisions in camps aligned with different band members.
“The documentary became a way to tell everyone’s story. Galban is not really political but lives rather stoically within the system, while Miguel’s life in Miami is a life of memories, more poetic than cultural. The film addresses the disparity between their lives.”
While touring festivals in the States, DeStefano has found his film revelatory for young viewers.
“It tends to be very emotional, mainly in the surprise that their lives in Cuba are as tangible as ours. But it also has a profound impact on viewers in Cuba. People grew up, made love, and had families to this music. A guy in Havana came up after one screening and said, ‘You gave me back my youth.’?”
With Fidel Castro in uncertain health lately, the whole country is in a tough transition.
“It’s gotta be very strange right now,” the filmmaker muses. “We had permission to go, through an agency in Miami, so there were no problems. But it would be trickier now. But stories like this tend to be timeless. You know, the cars in Cuba don’t change, anyway. If Castro dies, people will be looking back, and this touches on that aspect; with its background of the ’60s and the Cold War, this frames it for people.
“I think the biggest surprise is about how much more than about a band this movie was. It’s about the connection Los Zafiros had with the people and in what high regard they are still held now, among younger people. It’s not like a commercial product crammed down people’s throats these days. The fact that they kept them alive without PR and product—well, it carries an association with better times, or at least different, less complicated times.”
DeStefano says that Cuba has gone through many cycles in relation to its culture, as in the early 1960s, when the sugar harvest became more important than singing in nightclubs.
“The Cuban spirit went into hiding. The party thing is still pretty strong down there, and we tried to illuminate what their lives were like through the ups and down. They didn’t make a lot of money, but they met a lot of ladies and had a lot of free drinks!”
In particular, it finds a tragic figure in Chino, the band’s resident chick magnet.
“In Chino’s face was embodied the whole story of rock ’n’ roll—a cliché, but entrancing all the same. The guy had it all, and in the end he was a broken man, too thin for his clothes.”
The director says his doc had to be nurtured over the years, chronically underfunded, but eventually loved by audiences and finally embraced by reluctant distributors. “Films like this require more care,” he admits. “It’s hard to walk away, and I’m not there yet.”
Over the years, DeStefano also directed many one-act plays, and he had a late-’80s breakthrough with William Inge’s Natural Affection. Currently, he’s hanging out in his vintage Airstream trailer in L.A. while looking to direct a new project spanning the first half of the twentieth century. And at this point, he’s not planning to use any archival footage.
Source: straight.com