Estela Bravo was born in New York on 8 June 1933, into a working class family of European immigrants. Her mother died when she was 12 and her father was a Union man whose ideas influenced all the family. Estela and her two sisters were raised largely by union organisers. She began working at age 16 and studied sociology at night at Brooklyn College, where she was president and founder of an organisation called Students for a Peaceful World (SPW). At the same time she worked at the Fur Workers Union.
For Estela 1953 was an important year. The death sentence imposed on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, despite an international campaign to save their lives, shaped her political consciousness. That same year she participated as a student representative in the 4th World Youth Festival in Bucharest and the 3rd World Student Congress in Warsaw.
In Cuba, Estela Bravo has been involved in many different projects. She directed a radio program called "Songs of the People" and worked in the cultural institution Casa de las Americas. At the request of the director, Haydee Santamarfa, Estela organised the Encuentro de la Cancion Protesta (Protest Song Gathering), in 1967. Later she was director of the Centro de la Cancion Protesta (Protest Song Center), which gave birth to the Nueva Trova (New Song Movement), whose best known exponents were Pablo Milanes and Silvio Rodriguez. A monthly TV programme, which she directed, came out of the movement.
She also developed children's television programmes and began to work on short documentaries based on archive footage. The scripts, written by Ernesto Bravo, covered the Rosenberg case, Malcom X, the Letelier assassination, Angela Davis, John Hill, John Brown and Paul Robeson. In 1979 Estela srarted working on documentaries about Cuba.
Estela Bravo is a self-taught filmmaker who began directing rather late in life, but over the last twenty years she has more than made up for lost time: she has independently produced and directed almost thirty documentaries. Her first films, such as Those Who Left (1980), Cubans in Peru (1982), and Marielirtos (1983) were available only in Spanish-language versions. In the following years, however, Bravo began making her periodic trips to New York with English-subtitled versions of her new films, such as Missing Children (1985), Returning to Chile (1986), Children in Debt (1987) and Holy Father and Gloria (1987). Missing Children won a Silver Hugo Award from the Chicago International Film Festival. Holy Father and Gloria won the Global Village Documentary Festival's Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Film and "The Village Voice". In the '90s, as Bravo continued to produce new films such as Miami Havana (1992) - selected for the "P.O.V." series on PBS. The Cuban Excludables (1994) received the "One World Award" from the European Community and BBC as the best overseas production on British Television. Fide! (2001) was selected for the Toronto International Film Festival and received an award for excellence in documentary filmmaking at the Urbanworld Film Festival in New York.
