“...a celebratory story about kinship and connection that transcends borders...”
-Trace Sauveur, Austin Chronicle
The Vocal Vidas are an all-female a cappella group from Santiago de Cuba, the cradle of Afro-Cuban music. In 2017, they were invited to perform in the United States for the first time, just as diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba began to close. As they traveled to Los Angeles, playing in restaurants, jazz clubs and preparing for their biggest concert ever – in front of four thousand Angelenos at Downtown LA’s Grand Performances – the journey of the Vocal Vidas came to resemble the story of two cultures, geographically close, yet ideologically disparate, as they begin to reconnect in the face of international uncertainty.
Follow our journey.
Press
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Jeremy Ungar (Co-Director) is a writer, director and documentarian. His narrative feature debut, RIDE (Bella Thorne, Jessie T. Usher), premiered at the 2018 Los Angeles Film Festival before being released nationwide by RLJ Entertainment. He is the co-creator of the Emmy nominated short-form series SURVIVE (Sophie Turner, Corey Hawkins). He was on The Tracking Board's 2019 Young & Hungry list, has been an artist in residence at the Gershwin Hotel in Manhattan and is a graduate of the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama's Directing Program. Soy Cubana is his first documentary feature.
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Ivaylo Getov (Co-Director) is a technologist and producer of interactive art and experiences. Merging a filmmaking background with emerging tech, he works to enable unique encounters that surprise and delight with artists, institutions and brands including Ford, LinkedIn, Google Arts+Culture, The Serpentine Galleries, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
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Robin Miller Ungar (Producer), a speech-language pathologist specializing in brain injuries, had dreamed of making documentary films for years. She found the subject for her first documentary short when she encountered the Vocal Vidas in a small chapel in Santiago de Cuba. The resulting short, Soy Cubana, went on to sixty film festivals, winning audience awards and jury prizes around the world. A year later, Robin produced her second documentary short, As We Are, which follows a group of young musicians on the Autism spectrum. The film premiered at the 2020 Woods Hole International Film Festival, winning the Audience Award for Documentary Short. In 2021, Robin's first long-form documentary, the feature of Soy Cubana had its world premiere at SXSW, winning the Audience Award in its category.
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Agustín Rexach Martin (Editor) is an editor and assistant editor working in scripted television and documentary features. He was born on the island of Puerto Rico. After graduating from Boston University, Agustín worked in Puerto Rico, Miami and at San Antonio, Texas' premiere post house, 1080, editing top-tier commercials, music videos, and any independent films he could get his hands on. In 2014, Agustín broke into Hollywood as an assistant editor in scripted television. In the years since, he’s worked on shows such as “From Dusk Till Dawn”, “Hawaii 5-0”, the 2016 remake of “Roots”, two seasons of “Genius” for National Geographic and Fox Television. In 2019 and 2020, Agustin had the opportunity to co-edit the season 2 finale of USA television’s “The Purge” and one episode of Showtime’s Limited Series “The Good Lord Bird”, starring Ethan Hawke.