Best movies like Cuban Rebel Girls

This feature-length documentary from 1974 takes viewers inside Fidel Castro's Cuba. A movie-making threesome hope that Fidel himself will star in their film. The unusual crew consists of former Newfoundland premier Joseph Smallwood, radio and TV owner Geoff Stirling and NFB film director Michael Rubbo. What happens while the crew awaits its star shows a good deal of the new Cuba, and also of the three Canadians who chose to film the island. (NFB)

Set both in Latin America and the United States, the film explores the historic and current relationship of Washington with countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. Pilger says that the film "...tells a universal story... analysing and revealing, through vivid testimony, the story of great power behind its venerable myths. It allows us to understand the true nature of the so-called "war on terror". According to Pilger, the film’s message is that the greed and power of empire is not invincible and that people power is always the "seed beneath the snow".

China Valdes joins the Cuban underground after her brother is killed by the chief of the secret police, Ariete. She meets and falls in love with American expatriate Tony Fenner. Tony develops a plan to tunnel under the city's cemetery to a plot owned by a high official, assassinate him, and blow up the whole Cuban hierarchy at the ensuing state funeral. Together with a band of dedicated revolutionaries, they begin digging.

A group of men parachute into Japanese-occupied Burma with a dangerous and important mission: to locate and blow up a radar station. They accomplish this well enough, but when they try to rendezvous at an old air-strip to be taken back to their base, they find Japanese waiting for them, and they must make a long, difficult walk back through enemy-occupied jungle.

It is the dawn of World War III. In mid-western America, a group of teenagers band together to defend their town—and their country—from invading Soviet forces.

The crew of an Air Force bomber arrives in Pearl Harbor in the aftermath of the Japanese attack and is sent on to Manila to help with the defense of the Philippines.

Spanning several decades, this powerful biopic offers a glimpse into the life of famed Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas, an artist who was vilified for his homosexuality in Fidel Castro's Cuba.

In this fascinating Oscar-nominated documentary, American guitarist Ry Cooder brings together a group of legendary Cuban folk musicians (some in their 90s) to record a Grammy-winning CD in their native city of Havana. The result is a spectacular compilation of concert footage from the group's gigs in Amsterdam and New York City's famed Carnegie Hall, with director Wim Wenders capturing not only the music -- but also the musicians' life stories.

The Argentine, begins as Che and a band of Cuban exiles (led by Fidel Castro) reach the Cuban shore from Mexico in 1956. Within two years, they mobilized popular support and an army and toppled the U.S.-friendly regime of dictator Fulgencio Batista.

A crook decides to bump off members of his inept crew and blame their deaths on a legendary sea creature. What he doesn't know is that the creature is real.

A British mercenary arrives in pre-Revolution Cuba to help train the corrupt General Batista's army against Castro's guerrillas while he also romances a former lover now married to an unscrupulous plantation owner.

Copenhagen, Denmark, 1962. When a high-ranking Soviet official decides to change sides, a French intelligence agent is caught up in a cold, silent and bloody spy war in which his own family will play a decisive role.

Fidel Castro rises to power in Cuba.

Documentary about Fidel Castro, covering 40 years of Cuban Revolution. Rare Fidel Castro footage: he appears swimming with a bodyguard, visiting his childhood home and school, playing with his friend Nelson Mandela, meeting kid Elián Gonzalez, and celebrating his birthday with the Buena Vista Social Club group.

Using archival footage, cabinet conversation recordings, and an interview of the 85-year-old Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts his life, from working as a WWII whiz-kid military officer, to being the Ford Motor Company's president, to managing the Vietnam War as defense secretary for presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

In 2008, Natasha, a newly rich woman, decides to open an independent TV station in Russia and builds an open-minded team of outcasts. By 2020, Natasha has lost everything to Russia's war between Propaganda and Truth.

An adventurer gets caught up in a plot to kill Fidel Castro.

American and British tourists get caught up in political unrest in Haiti.

Four vignettes about the lives of the Cuban people set during the pre-revolutionary era.

Oliver Stone's second documentary on/interview with Fidel Castro specifically addresses his country's recent crackdown on Cuban dissidents; namely, the execution of three men who hijacked a ferry to the United States.

In Havana, Cuba in the late 1950's, a wealthy family, one of whose sons is a prominent nightclub owner, is caught in the violent transition from the oppressive regime of Batista to the Marxist government of Fidel Castro. Castro's regime ultimately leads the nightclub owner to flee to New York.

Cuba, 1961: 250,000 volunteers taught 700,000 people to read and write in one year. 100,000 of the teachers were under 18 years old. Over half were women. MAESTRA explores this story through the personal testimonies of the young women who went out to teach literacy in rural communities across the island - and found themselves deeply transformed in the process.

An American salvage diver plunges into dangerous intrigue around a sunken treasure in the Philippines.

In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs incident, Sergio chooses to stay behind in Cuba while his wife and family escape to neighboring Miami. Alone in a brave new world, Sergio observes the constant threat of foreign invasion while chasing young women all over Havana. He finally meets Elena, a young virgin girl he seeks to mould into the image of his ex-wife, but at what cost to himself?

After the Cuban Revolution, Che is at the height of his fame and power. Then he disappears, re-emerging incognito in Bolivia, where he organizes a small group of Cuban comrades and Bolivian recruits to start the great Latin American Revolution. Through this story, we come to understand how Che remains a symbol of idealism and heroism that lives in the hearts of people around the world.

An advertising executive and his temperamental wife adopt a war orphan who turns out to be a beautiful woman.

The brash, opinionated owner of a nightclub manages to drive everybody crazy on a boat trip to Havana.

Tough guy fights gangsters and counterfeiters in pre-Castro Cuba.

The story of a nightclub.

A patriot (René Lavan) with a rebellious brother falls in love with a dissident's daughter (Mayte Vilán) in Castro's Cuba.

College student, cattle baron, confused love story.

Biography of Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who helped Fidel Castro in his struggle against the corrupt Batista regime, eventually resulting in the overthrow of that government and Castro's taking over of Cuba. The film covers Guevara's life from when he first landed in Cuba in 1956 to his death in an ambush by government troops in the mountains of Bolivia in 1967.

Freddy Maemura Hurtado, a second-generation Japanese-Bolivian, heads to Cuba to study medicine. He meets revolutionist Che Guevara. When civil war breaks out in Bolivia, he decides to join Guevara’s revolutionary army under the name of “Ernesto Medico”.

A Yank comes to Havana in search of an old friend who disappeared during the Cuban Revolution, and discovers a group of Batista sympathizers plotting to overturn Castro.

Three U.S. journalists get too close to one another and their work in 1979 Nicaragua.

Errol Flynn, the swashbuckling Hollywood star and notorious ladies man, flouted convention all his life, but never more brazenly than in his last years when, swimming in vodka and unwilling to face his mortality, he undertook a liaison with an aspiring actress, Beverly Aadland. The two had a high-flying affair that spanned the globe and was enabled by the girl's fame-obsessed mother, Florence. It all came crashing to an end in October 1959, when events forced the relationship into the open, sparking an avalanche of publicity castigating Beverly and her mother - which only fed Florence's need to stay in the spotlight.

A documentary about the life of Errol Flynn, with recollections from friends and family.

Based on the concept of "New America" in the year 2097, two decades after a nuclear apocalypse, Tex Kennedy, two robotic ex-secret service agents, and a female cannibal journey to find a famously dangerous area known as the "Threshold of Hell" to gain access to a radio tower to unite the survivors of the apocalypse.

In 1959, a young journalist ventures to Havana, Cuba to meet his idol, the legendary Ernest Hemingway who helped him find his literary voice, while the Cuban Revolution comes to a boil around them.

The story of Tasmanian-born actor Errol Flynn whose short & flamboyant life, full of scandals, adventures, loves and excess was largely played out in front of the camera - either making movies or filling the newsreels and gossip magazines. Tragically he was dead from the effects of drugs and alcohol by the time he was only 50 & the myths live on. But there is another side of Flynn that is less well known - his ambitions to be a serious writer and newspaper correspondent, his documentary films and his interest in the Spanish Civil War and Castro's Cuba

Set in the 1960's, a school teacher pretends to be a CIA spy to get his nagging wife off his back. He helps a Russian ballet dancer defect and is then sent to Cuba to locate "Agent X" for the CIA.

Dollan Cannell's documentary on the hundreds of alleged plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, and a look at the evolution of Cuban politics. If the title of this extraordinary film sounds ludicrous, don't be fooled. This film looks at the incredible story of the 638 alleged plots by the CIA and Cuban exiles to kill the Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Two people rose to the rank of comandante during the Cuban Revolution. One was Che Guevara. The other was a man from Ohio.

The "edad de la peseta" or silly age is the term used in Cuba for the pre-adolescent period from the age of seven to the age of eleven. Set in 1958 in Havana, the year that culminates the Revolution, ten-year-old Samuel has just arrived in town with his recently divorced mother. They take up residence in the house of his eccentric grandmother Violeta, and Samuel is introduced to a new, mysterious world where Samuel finds himself an adult in comparison to his child-like mother.

A story about a simple man from the mountains, Guaguasi, who falls in love with a beautiful chorus girl, Marina, during the Cuban Revolution. Guaguasi joins the rebels and arrives in Havana at the end of Batista's dictatorship, and, in the midst of political turmoil, is swept off his feet by the mesmerising Marina. The story celebrates the vitality and lunacy of the Revolution period with surrealism, humor and sensuality and is a compassionate metaphor about the human condition.

The world is still reeling from the assassination of JFK - but has yet to lose his kid brother Bobby. In the midst of all this, a reluctant hero by the name of Lucien Rivard becomes enmeshed in a web of global political intrigue and corruption.

In 1950s Havana, a romance blooms between two young revolutionaries whose clandestine printing press publishes pamphlets meant to stir up rebellion against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. As their popularity grows, so, too, does their revolutionary zeal and their desire to mobilize other urban guerilla units.

Japanese fishery instructor Akira is attracted to beautiful Cuban young girl Martia. Though initially rejected, Akira still returns with Martia to her homeland. On the way he sees a post-revolution Cuba, cultivating fields, relics from the revolution, armies in training, and Castro in a political rally.

Havana, spring 1971: The poet Heberto Padilla has just been set free and appears before the Cuban Writers' Union where he pronounces a statement of "heartfelt self-criticism", declares himself to be a counterrevolutionary agent and throws accusations of complicity at many of his colleagues present at the event, among them, his wife. A month previously, his arrest under the accusation of endangering the security of the Cuban state had mobilised prominent intellectuals all over the world, who wrote a letter to Fidel Castro calling for the release of the poet, whose only sin had been to dissent through his poetic work. The writer's mea culpa, the recording of which is shown for the first time to the public, marks the narrative line of a story including the testimonies of Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Edwards and Fidel Castro.