Robin Hayes felt out of place as a Yale graduate student.
In 2001, she and several Yale African-American studies students – most Black like herself – created a refuge in The Black Resistance Reading Group. The next year, the group went to Cuba.
For a week, the group of nine, armed with video-cameras, left the predominantly White confines of New Haven, Ct., for the island nation that is 62 percent Black and Mulatto. The result is a documentary: “Beautiful Me(s): Finding our Revolutionary Selves in Black Cuba.”
Hayes, the director and now an assistant professor of ethnic studies and political science at Santa Clara University, will screen the film Feb. 19 at The Community Folks Arts Center in Syracuse, NY. (See the trailer.)
The film mingles interviews of the students with whatever Cuba footage the non-professional videographers could salvage. It’s more about the group’s reaction to Cuba than Cuba itself.
“I think that, from the beginning, our objective was to document our experience,” Hayes said in an interview.
