FILM: Los Hermanos

If you like modern Cuban classical music, or if you just enjoy a good uplifting story, you should see Los Hermanos (The Brothers), a documentary about two Cuban brothers, both extraordinary musicians, one a violinist who made his life in the US and the other a composer and pianist who made his life in Cuba. After decades of limited contact, the two finally got the opportunity to make music together in a joyful reunion. Through some improbably obtained archival footage, we get glimpses of their childhood in Havana, their musical education, and their father who is a notable Cuban composer and conductor. The film beautifully presents Cuban life in all its contradictions, the joy and the privations, the cultural richness and the bureaucracy. But the heart of the story is the music and the passion for making it, and the music these brothers are making is vibrant and riveting. There are some great scenes that really give insight into how musicians talk to each other as they are bringing a piece of music to life. There is a joy in life that they exude in their music, and they wear their hearts on their sleeves, on their strings, and in their scores. We came away from this film smiling, humming, and filled with their contagious joy. We were lucky to attend the film premiere in Santa Monica, where we could enjoy this music-filled film in full theater sound, and afterward there was a Q&A with the filmmakers Ken Schneider and Marcia Jarmel hosted by NPR arts journalist Mandelit Del Barco. (Ken is an old high school friend, and I couldn’t be more proud to know Ken and Marcia after seeing this fantastic work!)

FILM: Limbo

From the trailer, we expected Limbo would be more funny and more uplifting than it was. What we found instead was a more thoughtful and existential reflection on the experience of refugees in the limbo of awaiting adjudication of their status. The story centers on Omar, a young Syrian man from a lineage of famous musicians, who carries his “oud” (a lute-like instrument) with him everywhere he goes, but never plays it. He lives with several other would-be immigrants from various places on a remote windswept Scottish island, where they are not allowed to work, and must simply wait for months or perhaps years for their status to be resolved. They are met with varying reactions from the locals, ranging from true sympathy and kindness to suspicion and outright racism. A class meant to teach them about British culture provides some of the lighter moments. The real humanity is revealed slowly as we get glimpses of these characters, their paths to this place, their motivations, and their precarious hopes. The film crafts a sense of the absurdist suspense of these refugees trying to hold on to hope in this limbo of unknown duration and outcome, where peers are sometimes taken away with no explanation, and the rest remain like the characters in Waiting For Godot. The setting of the remote barren island perfectly enhances the bleakness. An improbable looking phonebooth in the middle of nowhere provides occasional communication with distant families, unless they want to hike up to the top of the local hilltop which is the one spot on the whole island with cellular reception. Omar walks through this life in a sort of jet-lagged daze, like Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation”. He wistfully remembers the apricots from his family’s fruit trees, and the sweets his grandmother made from them. There’s a Syrian expression — “tomorrow there will be apricots” — meant to offer hope when things look bleak. He never heard the expression growing up, because, he confesses, “there were always apricots.” A cast on his hand has kept him from playing his oud, but when the cast is removed, it turns out there’s an emotional cast on his spirit which is really what keeps him from playing his music again. He needs to rediscover the slender thread of hope that has lead him this far. The end is neither a Hollywood ending nor a French ending, but it is a thing of quiet beauty. While this was not what we expected, I was glad I saw it.