Joseph Smallwood, the former premier of Newfoundland, and Geoff Stirling, a Newfoundland broadcaster, travel to Cuba in the early 1970s with National Film Board director Michael Rubbo, convinced they can arrange an on-camera interview with Fidel Castro. The film Rubbo actually makes is about the wait itself: weeks pass in a Havana hotel while Castro's schedule keeps swallowing the promised meeting, and the crew's cameras stay running on the three men instead. Smallwood, a lifelong capitalist and admirer of Castro's nerve, and Stirling, drawn to the revolution's romance, argue with each other about what they are seeing in the sugar fields, schools, and factories the government shows them, while Rubbo narrates his own doubts about the access he isn't getting. The interview never quite happens, and the film turns that failure into its subject, a portrait of two Canadians projecting their own politics onto a country neither of them can pin down. It stands as an early example of the filmmaker becoming part of the story rather than staying behind the camera.