TIERRA SAGRADA (SACRED GROUND), a new 125 minute film produced and directed by Ned Sublette for Postmambo and Caridad Diez for Rumbaways (Director of photography: Lily Keber) offers the most extensive documentation ever seen on film of Afro-Cuban religious ritual. Shot during the last pre-pandemic moment, January 2020, in west-central Cuba, TIERRA SAGRADA takes the viewer to sacred spaces in a region of Cuba where captive Africans were brought in large numbers as late as the 1860s. Filmed in urban house temples, lush rural groves, and public parties in and around Matanzas and Sagua La Grande -- places that have not previously been seen on film – with the participation of ancestors, elders, and youth, and a variety of African-descended drums. The nine scenes of TIERRA SAGRADA feature wall-to-wall singing, drumming, and movement, with strong momentum toward the dramatic experience of spirit possession.
Tierra Sagrada premiered at Big Ears, and makes its second screening at this year's Pop Conference, followed by a talkback conversation with Ned Sublette and Pablo Herrera.
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NED SUBLETTE (executive producer, co-producer, co-director, editor, camera operator), author
of the best-selling Cuba and Its Music and three other books, has been working on the ground
in Cuba since 1990 and has traveled there 57 times. In 2015, following the Obama-era US
opening to Cuba, he founded Postmambo Studies, which produces media, live events, and
immersive live-music seminars; TIERRA SAGRADA was filmed during the final Postmambo
Cuban Music Seminar, in January 2020. Future seminars are scheduled for Cali, Colombia
(August 2022) and New Orleans (February 2023) [info@postmambo.com]. As an adjunct professor for the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University, Sublette created and co-taught the Institute’s Experiencing Havana’s Music course in Havana during January 2019 and January 2020. Beginning in 1990, as a producer for the Peabody Award-winning public radio program Afropop Worldwide, he produced over 100 radio documentaries about various aspects of African and African-diaspora music and reported from
many of the music capitals of the Black Atlantic. He co-founded and managed the influential
‘90s record label Qbadisc, which brought contemporary Cuban music to the US market.
He has been a Knight Luce Fellow for Reporting on Global Religion, a Guggenheim Fellow, a
Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Tulane Rockefeller Humanities Fellow, and a
Patrick Henry Writing Fellow at the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience
at Washington College in Chestertown MD.
CARIDAD DIEZ (co-producer, co-director) has been producing live and recorded music in Cuba
since the 1980s. A musicologist and a Latin Grammy-winning record producer for the album La
Rumba Soy Yo (2001), she has managed Los Muñequitos de Matanzas for more than thirty years, and is well known to Cuban TV viewers for her programs En clave de rumba and Caminos de la rumba cubana. She co-founded the Cubadisco Festival, which she has co-produced since 1997. She has been an essential collaborator on Sublette’s work in Cuba from 1991 forward, and co-taught the Experiencing Havana’s Music course with him. She has also taught for Hampshire College’s Cuba program.
LILY KEBER (director of photography, chief camera operator) has directed two features, both
essential documentaries about the music of New Orleans: Bayou Maharajah (2013), a
biographical documentary about the extraordinary life of pianist James Booker, and
Buckjumping (2018), about New Orleans street dancing.
Speakers 
Ned Sublette is the author of The Year Before the Flood, The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, and Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, and is co-author with Constance Sublette of The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding...
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