It\u2019s no less true for being a clich\u00e9: art has the power to bring people together. And that power is at the center of the joyous \u201cGive Me Future,\u201d a film about electronic-dance wizards Major Lazer bringing their act to Havana, Cuba. What results is that rarest of creations: the feel-good documentary.
In following the EDM combo \u2014 Diplo, Walshy Fire and Jillionaire \u2014 to Cuba, director Austin Peters (\u201cHaim Forever\u201d) goes beyond the usual concert movie beats. Major Lazer\u2019s 2016 live performance in downtown Havana is electrifying, to be sure, but \u201cGive Me Future\u201d is just as interested in the logistics involved in putting on a show there, as well as the culture and the people of the country itself.
For the three musicians behind Major Lazer, playing Cuba was a long-standing dream, one they had well before President Obama began reopening U. S. relations. With their roots in South Florida and the Caribbean, the group had already played everywhere else in the region. (This is the kind of combo whose world tours live up to the name; besides the usual stops, they hit places like Pakistan, Croatia and Ethiopia.)
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Besides the expected bureaucratic hoops, the band also has to contend with the fact that Cuba has been isolated from much of the rest of the world, although it turns out you can still get your music heard in a country with a tightly-controlled state-run media. The film introduces us to \u201cthe paquete,\u201d a hard drive created by one Cuban techno geek; every week, he fills a one-terabyte drive with the latest international movies, TV shows and music, and it\u2019s copied and distributed throughout the country, in what\u2019s probably the world\u2019s most extensive non-online network.
The paquete\u2019s motto is \u201cno porn and no politics,\u201d but as one interviewee notes, this is a case where the medium is literally the message, with American reality shows and Korean telenovelas and Euro-pop making its way to a hungry audience that is deprived of such pleasures via official means.
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\u201cGive Me Future\u201d shows us a Cuba we wouldn\u2019t necessarily expect \u2014 when Diplo asks the sea of fans at the Major Lazer show to hold up their cellphones as the sun sets, seemingly everybody has one \u2014 although some aspects of a totalitarian country don\u2019t change: A political rapper with a large national following bows out of performing at the last minute, lest he spontaneously say something that gets the whole concert shut down. (Major Lazer provides stage time for several Cuban acts, and the film introduces us to some of these musicians as well.)
Cuba\u2019s cultural isolation perhaps comes through most vividly when Major Lazer plays a can\u2019t-miss 1990s party jam, and the audience fails to respond because it\u2019s a song they\u2019ve never heard, even though it was a huge hit everywhere else in the world. Still, the Cuban promoters and musicians represented in the film are never portrayed as closed-off or provincial; they\u2019re all striving to create no matter what their circumstances, and their thrill in performing is evident.
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\u201cGive Me Future\u201d culminates, of course, with Major Lazer\u2019s Havana show, and it\u2019s an exuberant event; the audience (of hundreds of thousands, stretching out over several blocks and occupying every balcony within sight of the stage) explodes with enthusiasm, and Peters and cinematographer Deering Regan\u2019s camera make that delight infectious. Even if you\u2019re not a big fan of EDM, it\u2019s hard not to respond to the chord it strikes with everyone who comes out for the show.
The buoyancy and electricity of \u201cGive Me Future\u201d will no doubt win Major Lazer new converts, but the film also offers hope that political and social gaps can always be bridged. Especially when there\u2019s a good beat, and you can dance to it.
Read original story \u2018Give Me Future\u2019 Sundance Review: Major Lazer Rocks Havana At TheWrap<\/p>\n

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