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Estela and Ernesto Bravo Film and Video Collection

Call Number

TAM.616

Dates

1954-2014, inclusive
; 1980-2010, bulk

Creator

Bravo, Estela
Bravo, Ernesto

Extent

79.5 Linear Feet
in 71 record cartons and 17 media boxes.

Extent

1365 videocassettes
on Umatic and Betacam.

Extent

56 film reels

Extent

68.3 Gigabytes
in 82 digital video files and on 16 DVDs.

Language of Materials

Materials are in Spanish and English.

Abstract

Estela Bravo (1933- ) is an American-born documentary filmmaker who has been creating films on Cuba and Latin America with her husband Ernesto Bravo since the 1980s. Estela and Ernesto Bravo moved to Cuba in the early 1960s, and as a result many of Estela's films focus on political and cultural relations between the United States and Cuba. The collection contains over 1,300 video tapes and film reels recorded by Bravo throughout her career. In addition to full-length features and video footage, the collection contains a small amount of ephemera, correspondence, home movies, and documentation related to the promotion and licensing of Bravo's films. Footage in this collection consists of interviews with political leaders and celebrities; scenes of historical events, marches, demonstrations, and performances; battle footage; clips from Cuba's State Council archives; speeches by Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, and others; and background footage (b-roll) used in finished films. This footage is primarily recorded on U-matic and Betacam video tapes, and produced on film reels, VHS, and DVD for screening and distribution. This collection has been partially digitized, and only the digitized footage is currently accessible to researchers.

Biographical Note

Estela Bravo (1933- ) is an American-born documentary filmmaker who has been creating films on Cuba and Latin America with her husband Ernesto Bravo since the 1980s. The Bravos moved to Cuba in the early 1960s, and as a result many of Estela Bravo's films focus on political and cultural relations between the United States and Cuba. Bravo's documentaries have aired on television networks including PBS (US), CBC (Canada), Channel 4 (UK) Canal Plus (France), and at international film festivals and retrospectives honoring her work.

Estela Bravo was born on June 8, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. The youngest of three daughters, she was raised in a family of working-class European immigrants. Estela worked for the Furriers Union while studying sociology at night at Brooklyn College. In 1953 she helped organize a group called Students for a Peaceful World. She attended the 3rd World Student Congress in Warsaw, Poland as a representative for the Students for a Peaceful World, where she met Ernesto Bravo.

Ernesto Mario Bravo (1929- ) was born in Argentina on April 7, 1929. Bravo studied medicine at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1951, while still a student, he was targeted by the state police for his participation in a student strike and tried on charges of organizing anti-government student activities.

Estela and Ernesto Bravo married in January of 1956. They moved to Cuba in 1963 after Ernesto was offered a position as a Professor of Biochemistry at the Medical School of the University of Havana. In Cuba, Estela Bravo worked at the cultural institution Casa de las Américas where she organized programs promoting folk and protest music. She later began developing television programs and creating short documentaries based on archival footage, which documented notable figures like the Rosenbergs, Malcolm X, and Paul Robeson. Ernesto wrote many of the scripts for these short films. Estela Bravo completed her first full-length documentary in 1980, Those Who Left, which told the story of Cubans who left the island after the 1959 revolution. In addition to his teaching career, Ernesto Bravo has worked collaborator with his wife on her many documentary films, and has written a number of books, including Modern Medicine in Cuba (1995) and Development within Underdevelopment: New Trends in Cuban Medicine (1998).

As of 2016, Estela and Ernesto Bravo continue to make films. In 2014, they were honored in South Africa by the Mandela Foundation, they released films about Gabriel García Márquez and Commander Juan Almeida, and they updated their 2007 film, Who am I? The Found Children of Argentina.

Filmography

1980 Those Who Left
1982 Cubans in Peru
1982 A Beautiful Mission
1983 The Marielitos
1984 Silvio and Pablo in Argentina
1984 Maurice Bishop
1984 The National Ballet of Cuba in Argentina
1984 The National Ballet of Cuba in Peru
1985 The Missing Children
1985 Children in Debt
1985 The Hour of the People
1986 Returning to Chile
1987 Who's Running the Show
1987 Holy Father and Gloria
1989 Americans in Cuba
1990 Cuba/South Africa: After the Battle
1990 Flotilla to Cuba
1990 Namibia: The Last Colony
1991 Mandela Visits Jamaica
1991 Mandela in Cuba
1992 Miami-Havana
1992 The Three Rafters
1993 The Cuban Excludables
1998 From Miami to Washington
2000 Fidel: The Untold Story
2000 Camp Kinderland in Havana
2004 Free to Fly
2007 "Who am I?" The Found Children of Argentina
2010 Operation Peter Pan: Flying Back to Cuba
2011 Anecdotes about Fidel
2012 Roberto To Love and Fight for Life
2013 Mandela and Fidel
2014 A Conversation with García Márquez about his Friend Fidel
2014 A Conversation with Commander Juan Almeida
2014 "Who am I?" The Found Children of Argentina (Update)

Arrangement

This collection is divided into 32 series by documentary film or by record type. The first 28 series are arranged in alphabetical order by film title. Within each series, materials are grouped by genre. Completed documentaries and edited fragments of documentaries are listed at the beginning of each series. They are followed by interview footage, transcripts, and other papers related to coordinating interviews. These materials are listed in alphabetical order by interviewee last name. Interviews are followed by general footage, film clips, and papers. In some cases, footage is listed in alphabetical order by title, but many of these clips have not been fully arranged.

Series XXIX: Independent and Unidentified Footage, 1980-1994 contains interviews and footage that is not associated with a specific documentary feature or cannot be identified with a completed film. This footage is not grouped by genre, and is arranged in alphabetical order by title or interviewee last name.

Materials in Series XXX: Collected Ephemera and Publications are arranged alphabetically by title or by general topic. Additional films related to Estela and Ernesto Bravo's personal lives are arranged in Series XXXI: Estela and Ernesto Bravo Family Films. Several of these films were originally numbered by the donors. Numbered items are listed in sequential order, while films that were not numbered are listed in alphabetical order by title.

Series XXXII: Gema de Cuba, Estela and Ernesto Bravo's most recent documentary, was added to the collection in 2017 and has not been incorporated into the existing arrangement.

Scope and Content Note

The Estela and Ernesto Bravo Film and Video Collection (dates 1959-2014) contains interviews, footage, and full-length films from documentaries created by filmmaker Estela Bravo between the 1980s and early 2000s. The collection contains over 1,300 video tapes and film reels recorded by Bravo throughout her career. In addition to full-length documentaries and video footage, the collection also contains a small amount of ephemera, correspondence, and documentation related to the promotion and licensing of Bravo's films. Footage in this collection consists of interviews with political leaders and celebrities; scenes of important events, marches, demonstrations, and performances; battle footage; historical clips from Cuba's State Council archives; speeches by Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, and others; and background footage (b-roll) used in finished films. This footage was primarily recorded on U-matic and Betacam video tapes, and produced on film reels, VHS, and DVD for screening and distribution.

Many of Bravo's films focus broadly on Cuba after the revolution and its relationship with the United States and other countries. Bravo's films address other issues related to Latin American politics and culture, exploring topics such as: children abducted during Argentina's "Dirty War;" Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship; the assassination of Maurice Bishop in Grenada; social and economic problems caused by Latin American debts owed to the United States; struggles to end apartheid in South Africa; and a 1984 concert featuring Cuban musicians Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanes in Buenos Aires.

The most extensive footage comes from Fidel: The Untold Story and its follow-up Anecdotes about Fidel. There are more than 400 video recordings related to these films. Among the highlights of this material are interviews with notable individuals including: Arthur Schlesinger, Ramsey Clark, George McGovern, Alice Walker, Harry Belafonte, Philip Agee, Ted Turner, Edward Heath, Jorge Risquet, Ricardo Alarcón, Vilma Espín, and Angela Davis. These videos also contain interviews with supporters of the anti-Castro movement including counter-revolutionaries like Orlando Bosch.

Other films featured prominently in this collection address the social consequences of tensions between the United States and Cuba. These films include Americans in Cuba, documenting American who moved to Cuba after the revolution; The Cuban Excludables, which follows Cubans who came to the United States during the Mariel boatlift and the conditions they faced while being detained by US authorities; and Miami-Havana, a film that explores the consequences of travel and communication restrictions between Cuba and the United States.

Not all of Bravo's films are represented in the collection. Footage from some films may be more complete than others, while footage from other films does not appear in the collection at all. In other cases video footage is duplicated in multiple series. Bravo frequently reused older footage in follow-up documentaries to provide background and context for a subsequent film. For example, footage from the 1985 film, Missing Children, also appears in the 2007 documentary, Who Am I?: The Found Children of Argentina. Additionally, there are many interviews that exceed the duration of a single tape, and are recorded on multiple tapes. These interviews will contain pauses and breaks in the conversation to allow the videographer to change tapes.

The collection also contains footage that was not included in any feature film. These recordings may have been shot with a potential film in mind, but were never included in any completed feature. The Bravos also recorded special events or interviews with notable individuals, even though they did not intend to include them in a specific documentary. These recordings include an interview with Mikis Theodrakis, a Greek songwriter/composer and supporter of Fidel Castro, and an interview with Brazilian Communist Party leader Luis Carlos Prestes (1898-1990). There is also some footage which is unidentified or has not yet been associated with a specific feature film.

Between 2014 and 2015, two additional donations of periodicals, programs, playbills, transcripts, and related items were added to the collection. They may be found in Series XXX: Ephemera and Publications. Transcripts and partial transcripts from this donation relate to the film Fidel: The Untold Story and have been added to Series VIII. Transcripts contain interviews of some individuals for which there is no film footage, including Walter Sisulu and Kalema Moutante. A small set of film reels, donated in 2014, contain personal family footage of Estela and Ernesto Bravo with friends and family members, most of which were filmed in 1958. These reels are arranged in Series XXXI: Estela and Ernesto Bravo Family Films.

Many of the dates in this collection have been estimated based on the content and release date of the film. Specific dates are listed if they appeared on the cassette annotations, while others were inferred from the film's content. The word "Bump" appears in several titles, and was used by Estela Bravo to indicate clips selected from a previous, longer, piece of footage.

Subjects

Conditions Governing Access

Materials are open without restrictions.

Conditions Governing Use

Copyright to materials in this collection, created by Estela and Ernesto Bravo, was not transferred to New York University. Permission to use materials must be secured from the copyright holder.

Preferred Citation

Identification of item, date; Estela and Ernesto Bravo Film and Video Collection; TAM 616; box number; item number; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

Immediate Source of Acquisition

Donated by Estela and Ernesto Bravo in 2012; additional materials were donated by the Bravos in 2013, 2015, 2015, and 2017, and by Angela Carrenno in 2015.

Audiovisual Access Policies and Procedures

Access to audiovisual materials in this collection is available through digitized access copies. Researchers may view an item's original container, but the media themselves are not available for playback because of preservation concerns. Materials that have already been digitized are noted in the collection's finding aid and can be requested in our reading room. Materials not yet digitized will need to have access copies made before they can be used. To request an access copy, or if you are unsure if an item has been digitized, please contact tamiment.wagner@nyu.edu with the collection name, collection number, and a description of the item(s) requested. A staff member will respond to you with further information.

Appraisal

Twelve tapes were damaged beyond repair and removed from the collection. Duplicate recordings of completed documentaries on VHS, Betacam and digital formats were also removed from the collection. Additionally, a small number of electronic files that were not created by Estela or Ernesto Bravo were deemed out of scope and deaccessioned.

In June 2021, ten boxes containing 164 digitized tapes contaminated by mold were photographed by Media Preservation Unit staff and deaccessioned.

Separated Materials

Commercial copies of Estela Bravo's documentaries have been transferred to the Avery Fisher Center in Bobst Library. Additionally, copies of the following serials were transferred to Tamiment's library collections: Bohemi, Cine Cubano, Cuba Magazine, Cuba Update, Cuba International, Education, Joven Cuba, OCLAE, Prisma, Science Magazine, The Sciences. Please check the library catalog for holdings.

Collection processed by

Jan Hilley, with the assistance of Heather Mulliner.

About this Guide

This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2024-02-06 14:04:01 -0500.
Using Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language: Finding aid written in English

Processing Information Note

Upon receipt of this collection, Tamiment Library discovered that many of the videos had mold damage or binder hydrolysis. Several tapes have been repaired and digitized, but many have yet to receive treatment. The digitization process remains ongoing.

To facilitate preservation treatment, all tapes were initially inventoried and assigned a persistent identifier, which is listed in the finding aid as the "ref" number. These numbers are not sequential and are not listed in a specific order. Individual tapes have been arranged intellectually by the full-length feature in which they appear. Tapes were originally received in boxes containing packing slips that roughly associated footage with specific films. Much of this contextual information was lost, however, due to the immediate separation of materials for preservation treatment. Information about footage content and associated feature film(s) has been reconstructed to the best of the archivist's ability through analysis of container annotations, research, and consultation with the donors. Footage has been added to the series that best represents the context of its use. Estela Bravo frequently reused footage in multiple documentaries, and consequently some footage may be duplicated in more than one series.

Videos were sent for preservation treatment in multiple installments, which resulted in several non-sequential box numbers. In 2016, box numbers were updated and listed in sequential order.

Titles of digitized videos have been edited or supplied by the archivist based on the content of the recording. Titles of videos that have yet to be digitized have been derived from annotations on the individual film containers and associated notes. The descriptions of video cassettes that have not yet been digitized often contain phrases in quotation marks. These phrases were copied from annotations on the cassette boxes. As digitized versions of the videos become available, descriptions are being updated.

Many of the videos in this collection were undated. The majority of the dates have been estimated by the archivist based on release date of the film or the event documented in the footage.

Two additional donations of ephemera, publications, transcripts, and promotional materials were donated in 2014 and 2015. Documents associated with specific films were incorporated the existing series, while publications and ephemera more generally associated with filmmaking and Estela Bravo's career were added as Series XXX: Collected Ephemera and Publications. Films reels documenting moments in Estela and Ernesto Bravo's personal lives were added as Series XXXI: Estela and Ernesto Bravo Family Films.

In 2016 videos stored on a hard drive and flash drive were forensically imaged and analyzed. Duplicate copies of full-length documentaries were deaccessioned and remaining videos were incorporated into series based on the documentaries with which they correspond.

In 2017, a copy of the documentary Gema de Cuba was added to the collection as Series XXXII: Gema de Cuba.

In 2018, 225 videos were digitized and described at the item-level.

In 2020, additional recordings were described at the item-level following digitization.

In June 2021, 164 original tapes that were both digitized and contaminated with mold were photographed and deaccessioned.

In 2022, 247 moldy Betacam and U-matic tapes were returned from a vendor employed to decontaminate and transfer them. Of the returned tapes, 10 original tapes were successfully transfered; preservation staff photodocumented the carriers, and disposed of them. At the same time 75 moldy tapes were decontaminated and sent offsite without being transferred; these tapes are in boxes 27, 28, 29, and 32. Further, 124 tapes were not decontaminated but preservation staff isolated the tapes from other items by housing them in a polyethylene bag with a desiccated board and RH monitor strip and then sent offsite. If this strip indicates an RH greater than 50%, contact the Preservation Department immediately. Do not open this packaging without contacting the Preservation Department. Isolated tapes are located in boxes 1-5 and box 19. The remaining 38 tapes were decontaminated by the vendor, but their condition was too poor to be digitized. These tapes were photodocumented and discarded by preservation staff.

Revisions to this Guide

December 2018: Edited by Heather Mulliner to include item-level description of 225 videos
May 2020: Edited by Amy C. Vo to include item-level description of 42 videos
October 2020: Edited by Jasmine Sykes-Kunk and Amy C. Vo to include item-level description of 32 videos
February 2021: Edited by Rachel Mahre to reflect digitization of videos
June 2021: Edited by Weatherly Stephan to reflect deaccession of moldy, digitized videos
July 2022: Updated by Anna Björnsson McCormick to record digitization, decontamination, isolation, and deaccession of videos treated by a vendor.

Repository

Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
70 Washington Square South
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10012