The Spirit of Salsa (2010)
People from all over New York City meet in Spanish Harlem once a week at Santo Rico Dance School, where they learn the art of salsa.
Watch Trailer
Cast
Reviews
The premise of famed Harlem Salsa instructor Tomas Guerrero taking on 10 new students, 2 of whom are a long-married couple, to teach them how to properly dance Salsa over a period of six classes should've been mined for all its worth! Instead we get a measly 47 minutes from the filmmakers Jon Alpert, Francisco Bello, Matthew O'Neill & Tim Sternberg that offers very little about Salsero Tomas Guerrero or the dancers other than some brief cameos of their lives outside the Guerrero dance studio. This story coulda woulda shoulda garnered at least, 90 minutes of storyline to avoid the label 'teaser'; in its final version it's certainly not a pleaser.
What is going on at HBO? This is one of the sloppiest docs I have seen in years. The pacing/cutting is awful, the photography is dreadful and there is no real story here. I had real trouble following the doc and at the end wondered what was the point of all that? To get superficial bios of dance students and then watch them dance around in the streets, in their homes and even at their doctor's office. It really was poorly crafted. I'm quite concerned as each new US doc I see gets worse and worse. Have people forgotten how to make docs in America?Try harder hbo