My son Marlon is a big fan of heavy metal. He’s only 23, so he can’t help it. I was luckier; I grew up with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who of course planted the seeds for just about all the genres of slashing white-boy rock and roll that exist today. Because I love my son even though he prefers that awful metal sound, I was intrigued by a film I saw in a documentary short program last week at the Tribeca Film Festival.

The 11-minute movie is called Hard Rock Havana, made by Nicholas Brennan, a young but experienced director and journalist. The film’s focus is the popular Cuban band Zeus, which has been playing in and around Havana for more than twenty years. Brennan takes us into the clubs, which don’t look much different from the rock clubs we have here in America.

The music is loud, and the mostly male screaming fans flash the horns (pinky and forefinger raised in defiant salute). We are also shown how the band members live. They have modest houses and apartments, pleasant looking wives and children, and they look and behave just as you’d expect: long hair, tattoos, and tons of attitude mellowed just a bit because they are in their forties.

The film reveals the universal appeal of music as a catalyst for bringing people together. Many Americans too often think of Cuba as a scary foreign place full of dreaded Communists who thumb their noses at us as they stand just 90 miles away from the Florida Keys. But the young people there seem no different from my son, who also loves to smash around in the mosh pit while the loud abrasive music wails. Any film that in some way unites people from different nations is a valuable one in my book.

I texted Marlon, my son, right after seeing the film, and asked him if he had heard of Zeus. With the brevity typical of his college-aged peers, he responded, “Nope.” So I guess the band’s popularity is restricted to the land of Fidel. Or maybe it’s just that Marlon restricts his metal choices to the Scandinavian variety. Who knows? That music sounds all the same to me, although Marlon assures me that subtle differences in styles abound.

Another short that grabbed me is A .45 at 50th, directed by Joshua Bell and John Cromwell, the son of actor James Cromwell, whose association with the Black Panther Party in the 1960s is the subject of this film. Long before he became famous as a TV and movie star, Cromwell Sr. was deeply committed to the Civil Rights Movement. He gave more than lip service. One time, he provided a safe haven for several Panthers in his parents’ New York apartment while they were out of town. Cromwell was in the audience at the screening I attended, and after the program was over, a man in the audience asked him if his parents ever found out about the radicals camping out at their digs. Cromwell just smiled and waved an index finger back and forth in a no-no gesture. Everyone laughed.

Perhaps the best shot in the film is Cromwell looking straight into the camera and talking candidly about how important it is to strive for social justice and to take risks for a worthy cause. He put himself out there for something he believed in, and his example is compelling.

Small documentaries like these are great; they are the “short stories” that take their rightful place beside the “books,” the feature films. When I was young and went to the movie theater, I would almost always see a short or two before the main event. It was a treat. Sadly, those days are gone. I wish someone would get the ball rolling to get these little films back into the movie houses so that a large audience could get as much enjoyment and inspiration out of them as I did at Tribeca.