Cuban dissident Doctor Oscar Elias Biscet is a 2007 Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, a Nobel Prize nominee and former Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience who was recently released from jail after spending over eight years in the gulags of the Castro brothers for his non-violent, pro-democracy, and pro-human rights activism. Before that internment, he had spent three years in the Castro’s prisons for those same activities. Since the press, both in the United States and internationally, largely ignores the struggles of Cuban dissidents against the Castro’s half-century totalitarian dictatorship, readers are hardly to blame if they’ve never heard of Dr. Biscet, but filmmaker Jordan Allott is working to change that. Jordan’s documentary about Dr. Biscet, “Oscar’s Cuba,” has done much to bring the plight of Dr. Biscet, and that of the Cuban people for whom he fights, to the attention of the world. I reviewed Oscar’s Cuba last March for Big Hollywood, and recently spoke to Jordan about Dr. Biscet.

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BIG HOLLYWOOD: Tell us about Dr. Biscet.

ALLOTT: Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet is President of the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights based in Havana, Cuba. He is a medical doctor and is considered by many to be Cuba’s leading opposition figure. Dr. Biscet was sentenced to 25 years in prison by the Castro regime for his non-violent promotion of human rights and democracy in Cuba. Oscar was recently released after spending about nine years in prison. Before this sentence, Dr. Biscet had spent three years in prison for a number of crimes including, Disrespect and Dishonoring National Symbols. Dr. Biscet only enjoyed 36 days of freedom in between these two unjust imprisonments.

BIG HOLLYWOOD: Have you spoken with Dr. Biscet, or with his wife, Elsa Morejon, since his release?

ALLOTT: I have not talked to Dr. Biscet directly since his release. I would like to give him some time to get adjusted to life outside of prison and I realize many people around the world are attempting to contact him. The day after his release Oscar watched our “Oscar’s Cuba” documentary and was very humbled by it. He liked the documentary very much. About six weeks ago I was able to have a quick three-minute phone conversation with Dr. Biscet from his prison outside Havana. During this conversation he sounded strong as he thanked the international community and human rights groups in the United States for the continued support. (more…)

“At eventide we buried our heroic dead, the last salute from their comrades and their officers.” That’s the narration which accompanies the poignant funeral scene in John Ford’s The Battle of Midway. The man who conceived that film — and its brother-in-arms, They Were Expendable — is dead, destined never to return to this world. The men who wrote the words are also dead, as are the men who spoke them. The young soldiers saluting rows of flag-draped bodies, the priests praying over them, the audiences weeping in their seats at the theater — all dead. Time passes, and the next generation remembers a little bit less about their forefathers. The generation after, less still. Before long, all that’s left to remind us of our debt to the past are yellowed documents, faded photographs, and weathered headstones.

And, of course, old movies.

By 1944 John Ford already sensed the onset of these creeping forces of forgetfulness, and so when the time came to make Expendable, he hatched a strange plan. First, he confronted Louis B. Mayer, the head of M-G-M, and demanded that he be paid $300,000 for helming the picture, more than any director had ever made for a single film. Appealing to Mayer’s patriotism, he said he wasn’t going to keep a single cent of it — it would be used in toto to establish a special place of military honor and memory, a shrine “for Pennick and the boys.” Mayer agreed, and after Expendable was finished Ford used the money to buy eight acres of land in the foothills north of Los Angeles, and to build upon it what became known as The Field Photo Farm.

By the time Ford’s funds were exhausted, the property sported stables with horses, a tennis court, a swimming pool, a baseball diamond, and a large parade ground — all of it reserved for the veterans of his OSS Field Photographic unit. A big clubhouse contained glass cases filled with the war medals of Field Photo’s heroic dead. A beautiful chapel was constructed on-site, with the names of the men lost under Ford’s command engraved therein. The list included Jack MacKenzie Jr., the young assistant who had narrowly avoided death alongside Ford at Midway and who had survived the rest of the war, only to be tragically killed in an August 1945 Jeep accident in Los Angeles. In 1947, They Were Expendable’s brilliant cinematographer Joe August collapsed on the set of his 277th picture, dead of a heart attack. Ford dutifully had his name added to the chapel’s grim roster. (more…)