About the Documentarians

With a passion for human rights and a commitment to art as it functions to transform societies, co-directors Philip Sugden and Carole Elchert initiated this project with five prominent Cuban activist artists in 2016. Their own artistic collaboration began in the 1980s when they traveled to produce artwork on more than 15 working trips to Tibet, Nepal, and other Himalayan regions. Sugden and Elchert's 1988 Cultural Arts Expedition inspired their first PBS collaboration, the ambient film White Lotus: An Introduction to Tibetan Culture. With in-kind technical assistance from Bowling Green State University’s WBGU PBS TV and grants awarded by the Ohio Arts & Humanities Councils and the National Endowment for the Humanities, these Ohio-based independent filmmakers created their first film and companion book. The book contains scholars’ essays and some of the 26,000 images amassed on that trip. The project allowed artists from three continents to produce work.

On their second and current production—Activismo: Art & Dissidence in Cuba—Sugden and Elchert also pursued artistic collaboration. Initiated in 2015 with a trip to Havana, Cuba, for interviews of prominent Cuban artists, the project’s primary purpose is to reveal how Cuban artists specifically engage through public performances that promote social-political change through risk-taking art-activism and dissidence. Sugden, a visual artist and professor of art, and Elchert, a writer-photographer, were inspired by Cuban artists who struggled during Castro’s rule. These artists still work today, under repressive policies, to secure their freedom of expression, the lifeblood of all artistic pursuits. The Activismo film production team also includes visual storyteller and film editor Jason Baker, and Grammy nominee Tim Story, who composed a soundtrack of sounds and music inspired by Cuba to complement the artists’ voices and ideas.