It’s called “The Lost City” and it’s an anti-Castro film directed by and starring Andy Garcia:

Roger L. Simon endorses:

Last night I attended the premiere of Cuban-American actor/director Andy Garcia’s The Lost City (trailer here), which opens next week. The movie is an epic about a Cuban family in the time immediately before and after the revolution. One brother is a social democrat, one a committed Fidelista and the third (Garcia) is the Bogartish owner of El Tropico, an Afro-Cuban night club where much of the action takes place. (The movie is infused with Cuban music and dance and has a sensational sound track.) The screenplay is by the recently deceased Cuban novelist Cabrera Infante who was an early on a supporter of Fidel and then decamped for Paris as the regime became more totalitarian.

Andy, a friend of mine, has been working on this film for eighteen years, so to say it is a labor of love is an understatement. The movie is in many senses the story of Garcia’s own family and is infused with a passion almost never seen in commercial filmmaking these days. When his character makes the final decision to leave Havana for New York, the scene of his departure is gut-wrenching. You feel Garcia’s own father climbing onto that DC3. This is a real “cinema from the heart.”

J.B. Bendel also saw it and recommends:

The Lost City opens in New York (and White Plains), Los Angles and Miami on the 28th, rolling out to additional cities in succeeding weeks. It is well worth looking for. Since it takes on Hollywood sacred cows, like Che and Castro, this film will need word of mouth support. The film critics of the antique media won’t help. The blogosphere needs to get behind it.

Spread the word.

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Related: Yesterday was the 45th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Babalu Blog led a blogburst in remembrance. Val Prieto also saw The Lost City and his moving movie review is here.