The cameraman in “Cuba and the Cameraman” is the indefatigable documentary filmmaker Jon Alpert, the director of the movie. Which begins inside a car, in Havana in 2016, as the death of Fidel Castro is announced on state radio. The streets are nearly empty and have a haunted quality. Havana has seen a lot of change, but in some ways it still earns its reputation for being frozen in time.

Mr. Alpert’s movie is a personal examination of the ways Cuba changed and did not change over the course of the 45 years he has been visiting and filming there, shooting over 1,000 hours of footage in the country and even accompanying Castro on one memorable trip to the United States.

The director’s story begins with cofounding the Downtown Community Television Center, where he used scrappy video equipment to expose sweatshops and chronicle labor struggles in New York. His interest in Cuba grew out of his activism: “We heard that Fidel Castro was implementing the social programs that we were fighting for here in New York,” Mr. Alpert states plainly.