An Evening with Estela Bravo

Regrettably, An Evening with Estela Bravo has been postponed. It will be rescheduled at a later date.

Fresh from the International Spotlight-Cuba of the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival, director Estela Bravo will discuss how she has documented Cuba over many years. She will screen highlights of her exclusive footage with Fidel Castro, as well as clips from several of her Cuban documentaries. Bravo will present her latest documentary Operation Peter Pan: Flying Back to Cuba, which movingly recounts the little-known saga of more than 14,000 Cuban children who were sent by their parents to the U.S. between 1960 and 1962. This clandestine operation, sponsored by the U.S. State Dept and the Catholic Church was one of the largest airlifts of unaccompanied children ever, and became known as Operation Peter Pan. Many parents had expected to follow their children, who had been granted visa waivers by the U.S. government, but in October of 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis terminated the flights between the two countries and the children found themselves stranded in the U.S. where they were sent to camps, orphanages, and foster homes.
 
In 2009 nearly fifty years later Bravo follows the first group of "Peter Pans" as they visit Cuba to explore their past and help bridge the strong emotional and political divides between the two nations. As novelist Alice Walker noted, "Estela Bravo's films are the work of an intelligent heart: moving, informative, challenging, all at once."