People, Not Politics, At the Core in Mariel Piece

By Oscar Corral, The Miami Herald
April 10, 2005

To make his first-ever documentary - on the Mariel boatlift - a young Lisandro Perez Rey knocked on doors two years ago and tracked people from Havana to Miami to a prison in rural Florida. His budget was nil. But his curiousity was boundless.

Colleagues praised it.
``I think he went into it with a clear head and no particular prejudice, and what came out was a really good film,'' said fellow Miami filmmaker Joe Cardona, who was so impressed with Perez's work that he hired Perez to edit one of his own documentaries.
``It's insightful, and it paints a fairly accurate picture of what it was, looking back. It's probably the best post-Mariel documentary I've ever seen,'' Cardona said.
Now theaters around the United States are releasing Perez's film, Mas Alla del Mar (Beyond the Sea), to mark the boatlift's 25th anniversary. In Miami, WPBT-PBS 2 will broadcast it at 9:30 p.m. April 15. Alejandro Rios, director of the Cuban Cinema Series for Miami Dade College, plans to screen it at Little Havana's Tower Theater on May 27.

For Perez, now 30, doing the film was educational and frustrating.
``I am too young to really remember Mariel,'' said Perez. ``But as I started researching it and talking to people, it was really a critical event in the history of Cuba and U.S. migration. It was a turning point for Miami. After Mariel, you start to see a lot more of the anti-immigrant sentiments. But you also started to see the rise of Miami's modern cosmopolitan flavor.''

TELLING THE STORY
For Perez, a second-generation Cuban American from Miami, figuring out how to document the tumultuous event - its multitude of dramas and repercussions - was not easy.
In the end, he chose to profile the journeys and follies of the assimilation of a few of the most colorful, eccentric, talkative and downright zany characters he could find.
From a transsexual actress who purrs on command to an avid santera who serves cups of rum at the feet of her statues, Perez gave them their fair say.
He only skims the surface of the political divide between Cuba and the United States, interviewing a Mariel refugee serving time in a Florida prison for a double homicide and his mother back in Havana. The interviews highlight the heartbreak of separation that still pervades the boatlift.

THE CUBAN ANGLE
Rios said that what makes Perez's documentary on Mariel stand out from others is that he was able to travel to Cuba and interview people on the island. Mas Alla del Mar is one of the few U.S. documentaries about Mariel that explores the Cuban side of the story.
``There are some frustrating testimonies of people in Cuba who lost families,'' Rios said. ``All these dramas have ugly facets, and he was able to capture them. It's very sincere. He leaves it open to interpretation.''
Mas Alla del Mar was named ``best Florida film'' at the 2003 Ft. Lauderdale Film Festival and ``best documentary feature'' at the 2003 Made in Miami Film Festival. It is also showing in New York, Boston and Philadelphia.
Perez graduated from Florida International University with a degree in anthropology and is the son of well known FIU professor Lisandro Perez. He paid homage to his father in Mas Alla del Mar by interviewing him extensively in the film as an expert on Cuban migration.
His father, who is on sabbatical from FIU to research a book on the Cuban exile experience, said that what drove his son to do a film on the boatlift was the richness of the human stories that came out of it.
``So often, a lot of these documentaries done about Cuba are meant to put forth a political position,'' the elder Perez said. ``But he doesn't have the political baggage that my older generation has in respect to Cuba, where everything is evaluated through a political prism.''

THE NEXT PROJECT
Perez's second documentary, La Fabri-k, follows a group of prorevolution rappers around modern Cuba and has a bit more of a political edge. The film, released in December at the Havana Film Festival, follows the rappers from Havana's poor neighborhoods of Regla and Alamar to the Apollo Theater in New York. He said he had lots of disagreements with the rappers on political issues, but they respected each other.
Perez laments that he probably wouldn't have been able to make either film under the Bush administration's restrictions on travel to Cuba.
``There is a great divide between the Cubans in Miami and the Cubans in Cuba,'' Perez said. ``Projects like these are on the front lines of that.'