As a tribute for posterity, Fabien Pisani opens the drawers of the private life of the influential Cuban voice Pablo Milanés, nueva trova founder. From there he draws archival footage, weaving it together with interviews with the singer himself, family members, and artistic collaborators (Chico Buarque, Fito Páez). It is the portrait of a brilliant generation of musicians whose words today reveal their disillusionment with a revolution they now consider to have failed.
It is standing in the present time, through the eyes and feelings of Pablo Milanés in the final stages of his life – having moved to Spain for medical treatment, yet always longing for his island – that the entire journey of the singer-songwriter is revealed; the man who, at the turn of the 1960s towards the 1970s, changed the face of Cuban music. They called it “nueva trova”, a new song for the new country that had sprung from the revolution, and it found in Milanés its greatest interpreter, singing of his people’s struggles and demands, lending new poetic depth to the Cuban son, embracing other South American musical expressions and drawing inspiration from jazz.
Directed by Fabien Pisani, Milanés’s adopted son, Para Vivir is an intimate portrait of a larger-than-life figure, admired by artists as diverse as Chico Buarque and Harry Belafonte—two of those interviewed — while, in the same movement, guiding us through the story of revolutionary Cuba. The singer of Para vivir lived through the revolution, supported it, questioned it and opposed it whenever his conscience compelled him to do so. (Mário Lopes)
