WORK IN PROGRESS: THE MAMBONIKS

Dir. Lex Gillespie
(86min, USA, 2015)
Spanish and English with English subtitles
Documentary

WJFF is partnering with Docs In Progress® to present this workshop screening. The audience is invited to participate in a moderated feedback session after the screening. This honest and constructive feedback is aimed at helping the filmmaker get to the next stage of completing and distributing the film.

In the 1950s, a group of free-spirited, mostly Jewish dancers from New York City fell in love with a sultry dance from Cuba called the mambo, earning them a nickname: the mamboniks.

Set in New York, Miami Beach, the Catskills and Havana, The Mamboniks features the infectious sounds of Tito Puente, Celia Cruz and Mongo Santamaria.

Film supported by the DC Comission on the Arts and Humanities

Screening followed by Q&A with filmmaker Lex Gillespie.

Lex Gillespie is an independent producer in Washington, D.C. A Haverford College graduate, Gillespie has been a reporter and producer for public radio since 1988. He’s produced hundreds of features and documentaries for NPR and PRI on music, history and culture. His programs include A Kind and Just Parent, the story of the Nation’s first juvenile court in Chicago; The Blue Lake, which chronicled the decades-long battle of the Taos Pueblo of New Mexico to reclaim its sacred lake; and Intipuca, D.C., the story of a village in El Salvador whose residents created new lives for themselves in Washington, DC in the wake of a civil war.

He’s won two Peabody Awards for his series on American music history Let the Good Times Roll (2004) and Whole Lotta Shakin’(2007). He was also a producer with the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History on the series Jazz Singers and Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was, which in 1998 won a Peabody and a silver baton from the duPont-Columbia Awards.

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