Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: VERITAS [Miami International Film Festival 2022 - Virtual]
The idea of what can be lost even when larger elements are at play can be a heartbreaking approach. "Veritas" [World Premiere] made through Florida International University is not quite a feature and not quite a special and yet it is dynamic in what it shows. It is too expensive to be made as a narrative and the story is so intrinsic and on the edge of what is important, that it occupies an interesting point of discussion, nearly 60 years after the Bay Of Pigs. The documentary directed by Eliecer Jiménez Almeida talks with the survivors of an ex-Cuban Battalion from South Florida recruited by the Kennedy Administration as an initial invasion force before the Bay Of Pigs.
It turned into a footnote when the Cuban Missile Crisis begin formulating but this happened before that crescendoed overtaking the narrative. The aspect though that it was told by many of the men now approaching their mid-80s in sitdown interviews give it a power which is balanced with some actual footage (though a lot of the black and white footage might have been drawn from WWII). Nevertheless the story of their training and then reverse landing is told and relayed very vividly, both in their emotions but how they were abandoned by the American force supposedly behind them.
From the first footage of Jackie O. speaking in Spanish at the Orange Bowl, the trajectory of what happened is quite telling. What this battalion didn't know at the time when they tried to parachute in is that the US ships had been sunk. The Bay Of Pigs despite their advice was the wrong place to land since it was too far from anything whereas an earlier fishing town would have been much more advantageous for the guerilla warfare needed. Once they got on the beach in the Bay, there seemed to be a MIG chafing the beach and then soldiers were waiting for them. A US destroyer is then sunk off the coast and hearing a person still alive relating this is a different aspect in a way than hearing about Vietnam since Cuba is so much closer. This reviewer was not born until after the Crisis so it is hard to imagine how it might have felt in South Florida.
The eventual capture and imprisonment of these men is again harrowing but also intrinsic to hear as well as State Department elements behind the scenes. Granted this probably just got declassified possibly by the DIA recently. But the film brings it home, when these men say at one point, they knew they lost and they didn't want to keep killing their countrymen. They were there to liberate Cuba,not destroy it. The epilogue speaks to that. They all wish they could return to Cuba and touch their soil again but because of their previous history, they likely can never return. And you can hear the heartbreak for them in that, especially when they recall that before they got on the retrieval flight when they were freed, they looked back knowing it was the last time. B+
By Tim Wassberg
