Cinematography
Virtuoso Afro-Cuban-born brothers—violinist Ilmar and pianist Aldo—live on opposite sides of a geopolitical chasm a half-century wide. Tracking their parallel lives in New York and Havana, their poignant reunion, and their momentous first performances together, Los Hermanos/The Brothers suggests what is possible when walls come down, and borders are crossed. A nuanced, intensely moving view of nations long estranged, through the lens of music and family. Featuring an electrifying, genre-bending score composed by Cuban Aldo López-Gavilán, performed with his American brother, Ilmar, with a guest appearance by violin maestro Joshua Bell and the Harlem Quartet.
Cinematography
In 90's Habana, a nurse and a home builder, hopelessly in love, live happily married. A circumstantial fact of her past life will put their feelings to test and undermine the most elemental principles.
Director of Photography
Documentary about Cuban education. El planeta de los niños is not a documentary and not a feature film. Sarmiento actually filmed a documentary subject with the mise-en-scène and the cutting of a feature film. Without further ado, she takes the viewer into a world where adults would appear to have died out ; a society within which all functions and professions are held by children with deadly seriousness as if things have always been this way. Only right at the end does Sarmiento reveal that she shot the film at the 'Escuele de Pioneros' set up in Cuba in 1979, an institution which Fidel Castro gave to the children of his people to prepare themselves for a later working life. The film opens with an as-good-as-real wedding ceremony and progresses via a birth to a simulated battle ; from birth to death. The subtle irony with which Sarmiento portrays this 'Utopian' world was not understood by all German critics.
