Balseros
An Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature, BALSEROS is the heartrending yet triumphant account of seven Cuban refugees--and their families--who risked their lives to venture towards America's shores on homemade rafts. The Village Voice raves that BALSEROS is an "engrossing documentary" with an "extraordinary sense of recording stories as they unfold!" While Presidents Clinton and Fidel Castro argued over the closing of Cuba's coast in the chaotic summer of 1994, nearly 50,000 "balseros" (a slang term for Cuban rafters) set out towards Florida, navigating the shark-infested waters on vessels made of wood, nails, and tar. The television reporting team of Carles Bosch and Josep M. Domènech began filming this remarkable story over those landmark 15 days. Then, as most of the rafters were picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard, Bosch and Domènech continued to follow their lively cast of characters, some of whom were detained for more than a year at the Guantanamo naval base before finally being allowed onto American soil.