Vida Buena
2021 · 15m · Cuba
Directed by Benjamin Buxton
Genres: documentary, musical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Shot on 16mm, this documentary follows practitioners of Cuban Musical Folklore.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
16mm doc on Cuban Musical Folklore by a Kodak/UFVA scholarship winner — the format choice is more than aesthetic and the access looks real. Fifteen minutes of Los Matanzeros at full performance is hard to argue with.
Buxton's choice of 16mm to document Los Matanzeros performing a three-hundred-year Cuban folkloric tradition is the right material correspondence — preservation form meeting preservation subject. Les Blank's Always for Pleasure is the proper lineage.
15:04, 20.1K views, Kodak & UFVA Scholarship recipient, World Premiere Camden 2021 — shooting Los Matanzeros on 16mm to document a 300-year Cuban folkloric tradition is the kind of medium-as-thesis choice Camden rewards. The grain matches the heritage; that's the whole film's argument.