Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba)

I AM CUBA is a dazzling portrait of pre-Castro Cuba and the first and only Cuban/Soviet film collaboration.

Like its contemporary, THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS, it is a politically inflected reconstruction of the events surrounding a revolution, but it is more lyrical and poetic than Pontecorvo’s realist work.

Kalatozishvili (winner of the Palme d’Or in 1958 with THE CRANES ARE FLYING) came to Havana to do for the 1959 revolution what Eisenstein had done for pre-revolution Russia.

The astonishing result displeased both the stylistically uptight Soviet authorities and the Cuban cinema-going public and the film fell into obscurity, until it was rescued three decades later by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.