A life spent viewing world from the left

www.thestar.com Jan. 31, 2003. 01:00 AM

Estela Bravo blazed way for Michael Moore Filmmaker's career full of historical figures

SUSAN WALKER ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER

Fidel: The Untold Story is the film that Estela Bravo was destined to make. As much as the documentary sums up the Cuban leader's life so far, it reflects the life-long concerns of the 70-year-old documentarian.

Born in Brooklyn, Bravo was the youngest of three daughters whose parents were union organizers. Her mother died when she was 12, but she grew up instilled with father's internationalist politics. As a member of Students for a Peaceful World at Brooklyn College, she was sent to a 1953 student congress in Poland, where she met her husband, Ernesto Bravo. He was an Argentinean medical student who had been imprisoned and tortured on charges of organizing students against the government of Juan Perón. In 1956 they married in Argentina and remained there for the next eight years. After Ernesto was invited to Cuba to teach in the medical school, the family (they have three children) moved there. Bravo became a fierce Cuban patriot

Her conversation is peppered with the names of political activists and leaders she has known. She met Nelson Mandela through South African anti-apartheid activist Joe Slovo; she knew Paul Robeson; she interviewed Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva long before he became president of Brazil. In terms of political documentary-making, she could be considered a godmother to Michael Moore.

She didn't make a film until she was 47. Since then, she's made 30 documentaries, including The Missing Children, about children who disappeared in Argentina, Children In Debt, about the effects of foreign debt on the Third World, and Cuba/South Africa: After the Battle.

Bravo staunchly defends her homage to the 76-year-old Cuban leader as the story of Cuba that Americans never hear. She had uncommon access to Castro, even though he initially refused permission to have a film made about him.

"The unguarded moments — that's what I really wanted in the film," she says. To put him in a historic context, she delved into a wealth of material in the Cuban state archives, including footage of what took place in Cuba during the abortive Bay of Pigs operation.

After 10 years work on Fidel, Bravo is ready to move on.

"At my age, you have to do in one year what you used to do in 10," says Bravo, who's hard at work on her next film, Operation Peter Pan, about the fates of some of the 14,000 children who were transported from Cuba to the U.S. by the Catholic Church right after the Cuban revolution.

Estella Bravo will introduce Fidel: The Untold Story in person at the 7 p.m. screening tonight at the Carlton.