Shoot Down over Cuba: a bold documentary takes Castro to task for senseless murders.

• Author: Moynihan, Michael C.
• Position: Movie review

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In June 2000, this magazine published an essay by Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley on Hollywood's "missing movies." These were not films that had been neglected by inattentive archivists. They were those tales of injustice that Hollywood had little interest in producing. Long under the spell of radical writers such as Dalton Trumbo and Clifford Odets, Hollywood was "a town that welcomed Daniel Ortega of the Sandinista junta but never took up the cause of a single Soviet or Eastern European dissident."

Almost 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the entertainment industry is still sensitive to charges of Cold War jingoism (though the spread of hipster Buddhism has necessitated the occasional dramatization of China's occupation of Tibet). But a spate of recent films--none of them produced in Hollywood--is finally providing a more dystopian and accurate picture of communism. Among them: The Singing Revolution, a riveting documentary detailing the little-known story of Estonia's nonviolent resistance to Soviet occupation; the Oscar-winning German political drama The Lives of Others, a deeply affecting portrait of the Zamyatinian nightmare that was East Germany; and Katyn, a dramatic recapitulation of the mass murder of 20,000 Polish officers shortly after the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact.

Even Hollywood's strange love affair with the Cuban revolution, recently evidenced by Walter Salles' saccharine salute to Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, is at long last showing signs of abating. In 2000 the New York painter/director Julian Schnabel memorably upbraided Castro in Before NightFalls, a portrait of the gay writer Reinaldo Arenas, who was imprisoned by the communist government for his aberrant politics and sexuality.

Now, from first-time director Cristina Khuly, comes Shoot Down, a brilliantly rendered and scrupulously even-handed documentary revisiting the 1996 Cuban downing of two civilian planes over international waters. Both were piloted by Miami-based Cuban exiles from the group Brothers to the Rescue, which searches for Cubans fleeing Castro in the Florida Straits.

The attack on the unarmed planes was soon overshadowed by the saga of E[ian Gonzales and is now largely forgotten outside Miami. Despite the smokescreen of misinformation presented by Castro and his foreign enablers, the grim facts of the story are rather straightforward. Asthree rescue planes approached Cuba, the lead plane, piloted by the Brothers...