A Brief History of Cuba in D Minor
[23min, 2001] Music & lyrics; Musical documentary about Cuba, director: Emily James
* Documentary Award, Crested Bute Film Festival, 2001
* Best Editing at Rhode Island International Film Festival, 2001
* Silver Street International Film Festival – Creative Excellence Award, 2001
A second collaboration with Emily James, and an even bigger role for music on this one than our previous work together, Wag the Dogma.
As you might guess from the title, this 24 minute musical extravaganza tells the history of Cuba at breakneck speed, from Columbus to the New Millennium, though focusing primarily on tumultuous period of the 1950s and 60s. The story is told by an American piano-bar entertainer (Dallas Campbell, now a rising star as a presenter on the BBC) with a troupe of dancers and singers belting out the big numbers.
The film also uses quite a bit of archive footage and some animation and drawn elements, such as the ’storybook’ pictures in this sequence from near the beginning of the film. Excuse the fairly poor quality – I grabbed this off a VHS I had lying around.
On a note of trivia, Russell Brand was one of the singing voices in the film. His is the gravelly voice in this track:
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In writing the lyrics, I had to do a lot of research on Cuba, about which I knew almost nothing when I began working on the film (this reasearch also went to good use when I later wrote the song Che – see the Songs page).
Here’s another of the numbers from the film:
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And finally, here is the instrumental overture to the film, which weaves together quite a few of the song tunes in that way that musicals do!
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