Buena Vista Social Club

Buena Vista Social Club (1999) is a documentary by Wim Wenders you can watch online on iFILM. It grew out of a recording session: in 1996, guitarist Ry Cooder went to Havana and coaxed a group of largely forgotten Cuban musicians — some in their seventies and eighties — back into a studio to play the son, bolero, and danzón they'd been carrying for decades.

Wenders followed two years later with a camera. What he captured isn't a standard concert film. Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer, Omara Portuondo, Rubén González — each one gets space to talk about the Havana they remember, about years of obscurity, and about what it felt like to suddenly be playing Carnegie Hall. The album they recorded picked up a Grammy; the film itself was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

What stays with you is less the music itself — though that's extraordinary — and more the quiet dignity of people who kept their craft alive with almost no audience, and then found themselves, very late, in front of the whole world. Stream Buena Vista Social Club (1999) online on iFILM.