Jonathan Ali

The Puerto Rican film unit was an experiment in community-based filmmaking that, during its most fruitful period in the 1950s and early '60s, made a series of remarkable neorealist short fictions and poetic documentaries; films with a social purpose, and also great artistry. Amilcar Tirado's Una voz en la montaña, in which a young illiterate worker's desire to learn how to read galvanises his village to create a literacy programme for adults, is one of the best examples of the film unit's method, a powerful and moving work of Soviet-style, utopian collectivist vision.

Before they went on to become leading figures of post-revolution Cuban cinema, Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea made the short film El mégano. The story of a community of swamp-dwelling charcoal burners who suffer from extreme poverty and exploitation, with non-actors enacting a dramatised scenario of their hardscrabble lives, it's a brutally direct and confrontational work of liberation cinema. El mégano was a shot across the bow of the dictator Fulgencio Batista, who had it banned.

Cuba's Sara Gómez—Sarita as she styled herself—is best remembered for her only feature, the feminist fiction-documentary hybrid De cierta manera (One Way or Another, 1974/1977), completed after her tragic early death. Her short films, however, recently restored, have come as something of a (re-)discovery. Of them all, Iré a Santiago, Gómez's tribute to her hometown, the centre of Cuba's African-derived cultural traditions, is the most obviously heartfelt, a playful, lyrical delight.

"Give me two photographs, a moviola and some music and I’ll make you a film” claimed Santiago Álvarez, Cuba's master of montage. The "nervous" style of editing he developed in his short films is seminal to the legacy not just of Cuban post- revolution cinema, but Third Cinema in general. Álvarez employs his agit-prop mastery to devastating effect here, an eviceration of US president Lyndon Johnson and his country's involvement in Vietnam that will have you believing that the 36th president of the United States had a hand in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The same year that Santiago Álvarez was skewering the United States in LBJ his compatriot, Nicolás Guillén Landrián, the first black filmmaker of post-revolution Cuban cinema, was daring to criticise the revolution in Coffea Arábiga. What started out as as a simple commission about the country's coffee harvest metamorphosed in Landrián's hands into an astonishing essayistic barrage of found images, original footage, text, voiceover and music that, among other things, makes the argument that the effects of slavery are still to be felt in contemporary Cuba. Landrián suffered political persecution and died in exile; Coffea Arábiga, recently restored, is an evergreen work of sublime mastery.

In the early 1980s in Jamaica, the feminist, working-class theatre collective Sistren decided to make a film about their methods of creative pedagogy in collaborating with female sugar cane labourers to improve their rights. They had never made a film before; they never made one again. Sweet Sugar Rage, a blend of testimonies from the field, fictionalised re-enactments and vérité sequences of discussion-towards-liberation, is a sui generis work of startling power, a thrilling example the radical potential of democratised filmmaking.

Born and raised in Trinidad, of Chinese origin and domiciled in Canada for most of his life, Richard Fung is a pioneer of Toronto's film and video movement of the 1980s, an intersectional inspiration to several generations of artists idenitifed as queer, of colour, of global south origin. Sea in the Blood, an essay weaving together home movies, family testimony and poetic original footage, is practically a template for how the personal can be political - not to mention profoundly poignant - in documentary filmmaking.

“I am the Creole pig. I am who I am. I am the pig of your ancestors. There is no other pig but me, the Creole pig, black, apocalyptic, a pig from the new world, whose blood washed the slaves of their sins, whose flesh is your flesh, up to the end of time.”

Universal, eternal verities concerning the human condition can be found in the seemingly unlikeliest of places, including an observational student exercise about a poor teenage mother and her daily routine in Cuba's Sierra Maestra. Abecé is, simply and not simply, profound; its final image and word of dialogue form one of the most heartbreaking conclusions ever to a documentary.

Acclaimed cinematograher Shabier Kirchner (he was DoP on Steve McQueen's Small Axe omnibus), preparing to lens a major US feature being made in the Caribbean on 16mm, decamped to his native Antigua with a Bolex and some rolls of film to do some random shooting and refamiliarise himself with the celluloid format. Realising the exposed footage was way better than average, Kirchner and his collaborator Elise Tyler went back and recorded some audio and put together this film. Dadli, an impressionistic, asynchronous and poetic ode to Kirchner's home island through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy, was the result, a far superior film to the feature it was an exercise for. Dadli is short for Wadadli, Antigua's name in the language of the island's indigenous Taíno people. Roughly translated, it means "our own".