Sons of Cuba

There is almost unbearable pathos in Andrew Lang's documentary about the Havana boxing academy. This is a boarding-school boot camp where dozens of nine-year-old boys are taken away from their families to train fiercely for the honour of competing in the national under-12 boxing championships and perhaps even for the Olympics, where Cuban boxers always do very well. The brutally hard training – and brutal activity in the ring – look an awful lot like formalised abuse. These are some pretty scared and upset children we're talking about, but often their trainers look like scared children themselves. The father of one infant boxer, a one-time champ, now lives in poverty, and the kids are shown thoughtfully digesting the news that three Cuban boxing stars and former role models have defected to the United States. A spectacle of yearning and heartbreak.