# Tribute to the Great Fellove in documentary presented by Matt Dillon in San Sebastián

**Date:** 09/23/2020

Matt Dillon knows everything about Afro-Cuban music, and more specifically about its representatives in exile, as he made clear this Tuesday at the San Sebastián Film Festival.

The New York actor presented at Zinemaldia El gran Fellove, a documentary about this great Cuban musician.

The film that Dillon brought to the festival, as a "special screening" in its Official Section, comes to settle a kind of sentimental debt of the American actor to the Cuban singer and composer Francisco Fellove Valdés (1923-2013), one of the masters of that mix of island rhythms and jazz there called filin. The Hollywood artist and the Caribbean musician met in 1999 in Mexico, where Fellove had lived since 1955.

As he recounts in his film, Dillon had discovered the singer when, months earlier, he found one of his albums in a store in La Habana Vieja. He loved the album and then decided to search for its author.

It was his friend, bassist and businessman Joey Altruda, who located Fellove in Mexico City so that, shortly after, he embarked with Dillon on an adventure that would last years. A journey that would bring not only the tribute film that he now presents in Donostia but also the recording of an album that at the time could not be published but thanks to the film will be able to see the light in the coming months.

Among the most moving moments of the documentary filmed by Dillon is the surprise encounter he himself prepared for Fellove with Cuban trumpeter Chocolate Armenteros, an old friend from the island. With him and other great musicians, including Altruda, the album that will follow the film was recorded.

Dillon's work is more than a tribute to the figure of his idol, whom he saw again in Mexico a day before his death in 2013. "It is the story of Cubans who emigrated; that of the musicians who left the island, in the same way that Buena Vista Social Club is the film of those others who stayed," he said at the press conference for the film's presentation.

Dillon also reveals himself to be a vinyl record enthusiast. The film's producer, Cristina Velasco, described as "intimidating" how much Dillon knows about Cuban music and the Caribbean country. "But he shares that knowledge of his not as an expert who just learned it but as someone who knows very well all the struggles of the artists, as well as the relationships of each one with the others... And moreover he tells you about it like someone who opens an album with photos of their family."

Dillon elaborated on the revelations that Fellove and others made to him about the racial discrimination they suffered in Cuba in the 1950s. A treatment that led some of them to take refuge in Mexico, where "they didn't have that problem and they were given a warm welcome."

The performer and director also revealed his vinyl record enthusiast side, which is evident in the documentary when he discovers Fellove's album among a pile that he buys in a store on Calle Neptuno in Havana. "One doesn't decide to become a collector, but rather goes buying records because he likes them and one day he realizes that yes, that he loves collecting them," he explained.