Activist and filmmaker Saul Landau dies at 77 - Washington Post

Part scholar, part journalist and part activist, Mr. Landau made more than 30 films and collaborated on more than a dozen books, most with an unabashed left-of-center point of view. His films offered inside views of Castro's Cuba, Chile under Marxist leader Salvador Allende and Mexico during guerrilla uprisings in the 1990s.

"I think I'm objective, but I'm not detached," Mr. Landau told The Washington Post in 1982. "All my films try to teach people without preaching too hard."

"That's why I make films .?.?. to raise people's consciousness in one way or another."

His first filmmaking splash came in 1968 with his documentary "Fidel," which followed Castro on a week-long journey through the Cuban countryside. Apart from any ideological message, Mr. Landau made skillful use of lighting, landscape and music to give viewers a vivid impression of what was then a little-known culture.

Although some dismissed it as propaganda, the film nevertheless offered a view of Castro as a man of the people, chatting with villagers and striking out during an impromptu baseball game. New York Times film critic Vincent Canby called the film "in all technical aspects, first-rate" and "a remarkable document of contemporary history."

Mr. Landau made documentaries about Iraq, Syria, Angola and Jamaica, but his most acclaimed film was set in the United States. "Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang" (1979), which Mr. Landau made with Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler, examined the U.S. government's attempts to suppress information about the harmful effects of nuclear radiation from open-air explosions in the American West in the 1950s.

The film contained compelling interviews with Jacobs, a dying journalist who believed his cancer was caused by his exposure to nuclear fallout from a 1957 test blast in Utah. Mr. Landau and his collaborators won an Emmy Award for best documentary and a George F. Polk Award for investigative journalism.

"It had a big impact on slowing the spread of and eventually stopping the construction of nuclear power plants," said John Cavanagh, director of Washington's Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank where Mr. Landau was a board member. "He illuminated dozens of important issues for justice and the environment and peace for the U.S. and overseas."

In 1976, two of Mr. Landau's associates at the Institute for Policy Studies, Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, were killed in a car bombing at Sheridan Circle on Massachusetts Avenue NW. Letelier was Chile's ambassador to Washington when Allende was ousted and killed during a coup in 1973. Moffitt was his assistant.

Mr. Landau's 1980 book, "Assassination on Embassy Row," written with former Washington Post journalist John Dinges, was a true-life thriller that linked the killings to the right-wing military regime of Pinochet.