Buena Vista Social Club

Buena Vista Social Club is a documentary about the American guitarist and producer Ry Cooder, who travels to Havana in 1996 to record an album with a group of veteran Cuban musicians, several of them well into their nineties. Wim Wenders follows him, observing the sessions in the studio and tracing the performers' lives in the city where they spent decades. The film later moves to concerts the band gives in Amsterdam and at Carnegie Hall in New York, combining performances with the musicians' own accounts of their past.

Wenders directed and wrote the film, one of 22 he has directed and the twelfth in chronological order, coming between The End of Violence and The Million Dollar Hotel. Cooder appears on screen alongside his son Joachim, while the musicians themselves play the largest part, among them Compay Segundo, Eliades Ochoa, Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo. Thirty cast members and seventy-six crew are credited.

The film received a rating of 7.5 out of 10 from 48 critics' reviews, close to its audience scores of 7.6 on IMDb from around 22,000 votes and 7.5 on TMDB from roughly 387 votes, an unusual agreement between critics and viewers. It runs 105 minutes and was made as a production between Germany, the United Kingdom, Cuba, the United States and France.