Tamara Segura’s documentary Seguridad captures a family feeling the inadvertent effects of the creation of a relatively new communist Cuba. Through archive footage, the documentary shows Cuba as a country of yearly processions to celebrate the peoples’ victory. The film also shows her family looking at their photos, a family torn apart because of that regime. Her father’s alcoholism forces her to go to Canada, only returning to discover the root of her father’s alcoholism.

In returning to Cuba and talking to her family, Segura captures an intimacy that viewers barely find in documentaries. Most of the time, directors put their interview subjects in the hot seat, giving them the spotlight they deserve. Instead, she chooses to sit with them, to have a closer angle of what they see and feel. I’m not saying that Seguridad invented that style of interview but there’s something electric about the way this documentary does it.

Seguridad shows Cuba as a country that looks into its past, images showing a country that’s lived in, and it contrasts these images with Canada, a beautiful country either in high def or 16 mm. Segura pairs the Canadian images up with narration of her doing things in Canada that she couldn’t do in Cuba. This is great and all, but I’m not sure what the occasional Canadian scenes add to the documentary.

I might also be reading way too much on some of the images in Seguridad. The documentary, for example, shows a rusty faucet while one of Segura’s family members discusses her family’s breakdown. And I’m aware of my nitpicks for it but at least it connects the same dots that Segura does in finding out more about her father. It’s ambitious in its own way and shows so much empathy towards a broken, hurt man.