Cinema & Documentary

Genie Milgrom was born in Havana and raised Catholic in Miami. This documentary follows her decades-long search for a family history that had been deliberately buried — a paper trail running through medieval archives and across several European countries, back to Sephardic ancestors who hid their Judaism to survive the Inquisition.

What begins as one woman's genealogical obsession opens into the larger story of the conversos: families who lived a double life for generations, and the descendants who are only now piecing together what was lost. Genie's own journey ends where her ancestors' began — with a return to Orthodox Judaism.

Mario Sanchez carved Key West out of cedar. Working with a chisel and house paint on boards he prepared himself, he spent some seventy years recording the island he grew up in — the cigar makers, the street vendors, the wooden houses, the funerals and the fiestas — in intaglios of extraordinary warmth and colour.

Widely regarded as one of the foremost Cuban-American folk artists of the twentieth century, Sanchez worked until his death in 2005 at the age of 96. In 2017 he became the first Key West artist taken into the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. This film returns to the streets he carved and to the people who remember him.