Cinema
I Am Cuba
Soy Cuba
Mikhail Kalatozov · 1964
Synopsis
In four stories, pre-revolutionary Cuba: a woman humiliated by American tourists, ashamed in front of the man she loves; an old peasant who learns that his land has been sold to an American company; a Havana student who joins the struggle; villagers who go up to join the guerrillas. Each reaches the moment when a side must be chosen.
Context
It is a Soviet-Cuban co-production, shot on location by Sergei Urusevsky with wide-angle lenses and cameras passed by hand from one operator to another, which allows long takes of unusual length. The screenplay is by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and the Cuban Enrique Pineda Barnet. Released in Havana and then in Moscow in the autumn of 1964, the film was rejected in Cuba as too aestheticizing and in the Soviet Union as insufficiently clear, and remained unseen for thirty years.
Who it is for
A long film, in subtitled Spanish and Russian, in four parts. It helps to know that the camera is its subject as much as the story, and that the four parts do not echo one another.
Prizes and reception
Rediscovered in 1992 at the Telluride festival, distributed in the United States in 1995 under the patronage of Scorsese and Coppola, it is regarded as a technical peak.