Lights!   Camera!   Indie!
Meet five independent filmmakers trying to create a scene in South Florida.

By Art Levine, CITY LINK
April 24, 2004

(article excerpt)
Lisandro Perez-Rey has everything he needs to edit his new film - about Cuban hip-hoppers touring America - right here in the modern bedroom of his condo in Miami.   The $1,500 custom-made computer equipment is arrayed on a desk as uncluttered as the razor-sharp focus the prize-winning 29-year-old documentary filmmaker brings to each film.   With a few assured clicks of his mouse, he calls up a scene of Alexey Rodriguez and Magia Lopez, the husband-and-wife team that performs as the group Obsesión, back in their shabby Cuban apartment creating a rap song.   He translates Rodriguez's rapping: "My lyrics spring from my kinky hair, my wide nose ..." The rapper tells Perez-Rey: "Blacks don't seem to be proud of their race.   We gotta confront that."   His film then intercuts shots of the musicians listening to the song's playback with heartbreaking footage of them staring through a window at rich tourists dining in a luxurious Havana hotel restaurant that the couple can't afford.  

It's clear that Perez-Rey is bringing to his new film the same flair for compelling human stories set against a broader canvas that he showed in his 2003 movie Mas Alla del Mar (Beyond the Sea) , which addressed the impact of the 1980 Mariel boatlift that brought 130,000 Cuban immigrants to Florida.   It earned a rave review in Variety , showed at the Los Angeles Film Festival, was named Best Florida Film at the Sunshine Celluloid program of the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival and has been picked up for broadcast by a local PBS affiliate, WPBT-Channel 2.

Perez-Rey was inspired to start the project by the research his father, Florida International University sociologist Lisandro Perez, has done on Mariel.   The filmmaker asked himself about the refugees, called Marielitos: "Who were they?   How did they turn out?"   With trips to Cuba and interviews with exiles, he worked for two years at night after his job as a TV producer to shape the movie; it's an artful, powerfully moving film that mixes interviews with historical footage and excerpts from films such as Scarface .

"I didn't have to pay anymore," Perez-Rey points out.   "I am the camera operator, the interviewer, the editor."   He used a $30,000 Ford Foundation grant for the film mostly to pay for archival footage.

His mastery of all aspects of documentary filmmaking is even more striking because he's an FIU sociology graduate without any formal film training.   He nonetheless taught himself to shoot and edit videos as a teen and has been working for Sky TV Latina America satellite network for the past six years.

Perez-Rey got the idea for his hip-hop film, La Fabri-K (The Factory) , when he learned that the Miami Light Project was going to Cuba to meet with talented Cuban rappers for last year's inaugural Miami Hip-Hop Exchange in Miami.   He turned to the Light Project for $3,000 in seed money, plus travel expenses, to make the movie.   He says he wondered, "What are they going to be rapping about?   Big-screen TVs?   Jewelry?   No.   They have a sense of social responsibility.   In their rooms, they have posters of Public Enemy."   He showed their lives in Cuba before and after the clique known as La Fabri-K, composed of two Cuban groups, visited Miami and then New York's Apollo Theater, where they played on a bill with The Roots and Kanye West to a strong response.

Yet Perez-Rey notes, "They weren't seduced by America."   And despite the concert footage, his real focus is "the lives of these young Cubans who are marginalized."   Like the movie's subjects, the filmmaker wants to see hip-hop bridge the gap between the two countries.   He expects to premiere La Fabri-K at next month's second annual Hip-Hop Exchange.