I Am Cuba

Sergio Corrieri, Salvador Wood, José Gallardo

Mikhail Kalatozov’s astonishing Soy Cuba is a stirring and unforgettable experience. Blessed with some of the most extraordinary camerawork in film history, it’s still pushing at the boundaries of pure cinema today.

Ostensibly, it’s Communist propaganda, celebrating the progress achieved by the Cuban Revolution and dramatising four examples of injustice to the common man in pre-Revolutionary Cuba. The link that holds the film together is a spoken monologue beginning each sequence with the words “Soy Cuba”.

“‘Ten years after its belated US release, it seems as if Mikhail Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba has always been with us, always staking out its tiny, idiosyncratic turf as Communist agitprop’s most unrestrained diva hymn and one of the most visually titanic works in the century of movies. Famously, superhuman cinematographic stunt work and unearthly infrared-stock exposures mate with an unfettered revolutionary outrage – abstractly detailing life before and during Castro’s rebel war – and the resulting assault is so epically 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.” The Village Voice

This version of Soy Cuba is the English-subtitled, full Spanish-language version, previously unreleased in the UK.