I Am Cuba (Soy Cuba) (1964)
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100% of critics liked it
(32 reviews) -
90% of users liked it
(4,133 ratings)
An unabashed exercise in cinema stylistics, I Am Cuba is pro-Castro/anti-Batista rhetoric dressed up in the finest clothes. The film's four dramatic stories take place in the final days of the Batista regime; the first two illustrate the ills that led to the revolution, the third and fourth the call… More An unabashed exercise in cinema stylistics, I Am Cuba is pro-Castro/anti-Batista rhetoric dressed up in the finest clothes. The film's four dramatic stories take place in the final days of the Batista regime; the first two illustrate the ills that led to the revolution, the third and fourth the call to arms which cut across social and economic lines. A lovely young woman in a nightclub frequented by crass American businessmen takes a customer to her modest seaside shack for a night of pleasure for pay, only to be found out by her street vendor suitor; a tenant farmer is told that his crop has been sold to United Fruit and in frustration burns his fields; a middle-class student rallies his pals and workers in a street demonstration against the regime; a peasant eking out a living in the mountains quickly converts to the cause when Batista bombers strafe his land in search of rebel fighters. At face value, this is all obvious agitprop, but director Mikhail Kalazatov turned his cinematographer, Sergei Urusevsky, loose, and the result is a procession of dazzling black-and-white images, shot with a camera that is almost always moving and soaring over the sugar fields, swooping in and out of urban buildings, following characters down narrow streets. Unreleasable to American theaters during the Cold War, I Am Cuba, through the auspices of filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, got a belated U.S. release in 1995 and has proved to be both a time capsule of a fading political movement and a timeless work of cinematic art. ~ Tom Wiener, Rovi
- Rating, Runtime
- Unrated, 2 hr. 20 min.
- Directed By
- Mikhail Kalatozov
- Written By
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Enrique Pineda Barnet
- Genres
- Drama, Art House & International, Special Interest
- In Theaters
- Mar 8, 1995 Wide
- On DVD
- Jan 18, 2000
Critic Reviews
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Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Some of the most exhilarating camera movements and most luscious black-and-white cinematography you'll ever see inhabit this singular, delirious 141-minute communist propaganda epic.
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G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle
It is one of the most visually hypnotic films ever -- and that's not hyperbole.
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Michael Atkinson, Village Voice
The resulting assault is so epicly impassioned it's less about Cuba per se than the fusillade of movement, shadow, light, vertigo, and landscape on the viewer's tender optic nerves.
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Stephen Holden, New York Times
It is a dream of life in which everything is reduced to black and white. Or as the rhetoric used to go, you are either part of the problem or part of the solution. Nothing was ever quite that simple.
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Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times
In a sense, it's a movie about looking past surfaces to see what's in front of you. It takes the time to look around and discovers majesty, beauty and pathos everywhere it turns.
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