Journalist & Filmmaker Saul Landau, 77, Dies; Chronicled Cuban Revolution For Decades

[Judi Lynn]

10. Saul Landau

Saul Landau
Monday 16 September 2013

Filmmaker;
Born: January 15, 1936; Died: September 9, 2013.

Saul Landau, who has died aged 77, was an award-winning documentary filmmaker who profiled political leaders such as Fidel Castro of Cuba and Chile's Salvador Allende. His 1968 documentary Fidel gave the world one of the earliest close-ups of the revolutionary leader who installed Communism in Cuba, but his most acclaimed documentary was probably 1979's Paul Jacobs And The Nuclear Gang, which examined the effects of radiation exposure on people living downwind from Nevada's above-ground nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s.

The director, producer and writer of more than 40 documentaries had continued to work almost until his death. He regularly submitted essays to the Huffington Post and had been working on a documentary on homophobia in Cuba.

Landau was also the author of 14 books. While most covered issues like radical politics, consumer culture and globalisation, one of them, My Dad Was Not Hamlet, was a collection of poetry.

His documentaries tackled a variety of issues, but each contained one underlying theme: reporting on a subject that was otherwise going largely unnoticed at the time, whether it was American ghetto life, the destruction of an indigenous Mexican culture or the inner workings of the CIA.

One of the documentaries Landau said he was most proud of was The Sixth Sun: Mayan Uprising In Chiapas, which looked at the 1994 rebellion by the impoverished indigenous people of southern Mexico. Landau travelled to Chiapas to interview, among others, the masked revolutionary leader known as Subcommandante Marcos.

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