DEAR FIDEL – MARITA’S STORY (LIEBER FIDEL – MARITAS GESCHICHTE) Documentary Competition

Wilfried Huismann’s DEAR FIDEL-MARITA’S STORY is the stranger-than-fiction account of a modern Mata Hori who could have changed the course of world history by assassinating Fidel Castro-if she hadn’t fallen in love with him.

Lorenz was assigned by the CIA to kill her revolutionary former lover with a poison capsule. But Marita’s story neither begins nor ends here. Her life-from childhood in a WWII concentration camp, through recruitment by both the CIA and FBI and affairs with world leaders, to her current dependency on welfare-has been a roller coaster of action and emotion.

Accompanying Marita on her pilgrimage back to Cuba, Huismann weaves together her fascinating story with archival documents and revelatory interviews with Marita and those who’ve known her, biblically and otherwise. Whether you believe Marita or not, Huismann’s film is a compulsively engaging tale set against a backdrop of international intrigue beyond anything Hollywood could dream up.