Cuban News Agency

The traveling exhibition is organized by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator
at MoMA, and Alexandra Halkin, Director of the Americas Media Initiative,
a non-profit organization based in Burlington, Vermont, that works with
Cuban filmmakers, while the Cuban counterpart providing the logistical
support is the Havana-based Young Directors Film Festival (Muestra Joven).

The documentary shorts included in the exhibition will be screened in the
cities of Cienfuegos, Gibara, Holguin, and Camaguey, before they are
presented at the end of the tour at the Young Directors Film Festival in
Havana.

According to the Americas Media Initiative, the goal of Closing
Distances/Cerrando Distancias is to screen a selection of U.S. documentary
short films that present unique and diverse local U.S. experiences to a
wide Cuban audience and, through cultural exchange, to increase
understanding and foster dialogue between U.S. and Cuban citizens.

The exhibition is made up of four documentary short films and one
animation short.

Two of the documentaries are Sara Neeson’s ‘Poster Girl’ (2010), about a
young female American vet sent to Iraq who suffers from post traumatic
stress disorder, and Gail Dolgin and Robin Fryday’s ‘The Barber of
Birmingham’ (2011), about 85-year-old James Armstrong, a foot soldier in
the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Both films were nominated for
Academy Awards in the Documentary Shorts category.

Other films in the program are Jesse Epstein’s ‘Wet Dreams’ and ‘False
Images’, a Sundance award-winning documentary, and Anthony Weeks’s
‘Housekeeping’, about a migrant hotel housekeeper’s meditation on her life
and the lives and habits of the people for whom she works.

‘Miss Devine’, directed by the Rauch Brothers, is the short animation
included in the program.

The Americas Media Initiative—Cuba Media Project is a new organization
focused on the distribution of Cuban independent and community media in
the United States.