Fidel

American filmmaker Estela Bravo's documentary portrait of Fidel Castro is unabashedly adoring hagiography, a positive take on the long-time Cuban president of a kind that's rarely seen in the United States. Bravo opens with a celebration welcoming Castro to New York City's Harlem, and the adulatory mood never flags, even after Bravo switches to the standard biography format. After a brief treatment of Castro's childhood as the son of a well-to-do sugar-cane planter, his early education (Bravo interviews a number of teachers from Castro's Jesuit high school) and days as a radical nationalist at the University of Havana, Bravo charts Castro's long battle against the di...