"Director: Andrew Lang"

• Sons Of Cuba | DVD | (20/09/2010) from £9.05   |  Saving you £20.94 (231.38%)   |  RRP £29.99

  Hailed by critics Andrew Lang's powerful and moving documentary Sons Of Cuba is a stunning insight behind the scenes of Castro's Cuba into the lives of a group of young boys; amateur boxers training to become champions of their sport so they can escape a life of poverty. And now seconds out - after its critically acclaimed theatrical release this powerful film is making its way to DVD. Despite being a deprived isolated island of 11 million people Cuba is the world superpower of amateur boxing. In the past 40 years it has won a staggering 63 Olympic medals in the sport 32 of them gold. But little was known about how these results were achieved until Lang and his team became the first film crew ever to be given access to the Havana Boxing Academy. Here a hand picked group of 10-year old boys rise at 4am six days a week to begin an excruciating routine of boxing training. Chanting Victory is our duty! Fatherland or death! as they shadow box in the dead of night these are the boys Fidel Castro has called the standard bearers of the Revolution. Sons Of Cuba follows the stories of three young hopefuls through eight months of training as they prepare for the biggest event of their lives: Cuba's national boxing championship for under 12s. But during the season crisis strikes: Fidel Castro falls ill and all of Cuba's Olympic boxing champions defect to the USA leaving the boys contemplating a future that is altogether different from the one they have been taught to believe in. Laced with emotion Sons Of Cuba is at once intimate personal and political. It goes deep into the heart and mind of modern Cuba while documenting from the inside a country at a moment of historic change. Sons Of Cuba will leave audiences riveted as they both sympathise with the boys' plight and cheer them on to potential victory...

• Sons of Cuba | DVD | (20/07/2011) from £8.54   |  Saving you £1.45 (16.98%)   |  RRP £9.99

  At the age of 28, Andrew Lang completed Sons of Cuba over a three-year production. The film received high praise for its even-handed depiction of contemporary Cuba. It also shows the uncertainty that followed in the wake of Castro’s retirement from public office; forming an indelible time capsule of 21st Century Cuban society. Although inspired by Latin American cinema, Lang’s use of the observational camera to show his subjects in their daily life deviated from the old-fashioned newsreel approach of his Cuban crew. His film approached his subjects as individuals and collaborators, as displayed in the film’s interviews with the children, their family and the coach. This accounts for the special quality of Sons of Cuba. Despite being entirely in Spanish, the film remains an outsider’s view of Cuba, attentive to the universal nature of life in a country that has often suffered on account of large-scale misperception and ignorance.