Thu, Apr 21 | 6:30–9pm | Ehrer Theatre
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The Center will be screening Ghost Town to Havana. The event is free and open to the public. Please register for this event and let me know if you have any questions. For more info on the film, check out Ghost Town to Havana.
Two teams. Two countries. One game.
A life rampant, street level story of mentorship and ordinary, everyday heroism in tough circumstances. An inner city coach’s son, estranged in his youth from his father, spends five years on ball fields in inner city Oakland and Havana, following the lives of two extraordinary youth baseball coaches: Nicolas Reyes, a 61 year old Afro-Cuban who coaches in a Havana neighborhood that is rich in community but struggling desperately economically, and Roscoe Bryant, a 46 year old African-American man who coaches in a troubled Oakland neighborhood wracked by three decades of gang violence.
The filmmaker introduces the coaches on videotape and Coach Roscoe vows he will take his players to Cuba to play Nicolas’ team one day.
Two years of US/Cuba sanctions and red tape later, Coach Roscoe and 9 players fly to Havana to play Coach Nicolas’ team. For the next week, the boys and coaches eat, dance, swim, argue, tease, and play baseball together. The wary, street-smart, Ghost Town boys gradually warm to the fun-loving friendship of their Afro-Cuban hosts. Baseball! Girls! Fun! Real friendships form. Then Roscoe receives a fateful phone call from home. Right fielder Chris Fletcher’s stepfather has been murdered on an Oakland street. Ghost Town to Havana is contemporary in content but as old as the Greeks thematically: the human struggle to wrest life from death.