I Am Cuba

I Am Cuba (1964)

Soy Cuba

For you, I am the casino, the bar, the hotels. But the hands of these children and old people, are also me.

A study in contrasts set in and around Havana that explores Cuba's 1959 revolution: a young woman's fascination with the excess of an American-owned casino leads to her downfall in the eyes of her street vendor boyfriend; a tenant farmer revolts the only way he knows how, attacking the land he works; university students gain first-hand knowledge of political upheaval; and, in the hills outside the city, the members of a poor peasant family are patriotically swept up into the burgeoning revolt.

Date of release
1964-10-26
TMDB
7.9 / 10 (267)
Runtime
2h 21m
Genres
Drama
Director
Mikhail Kalatozov

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: $274.1K

I Am Cuba is a 1964 political drama anthology film directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. An international co-production between the Soviet Union and Cuba, it follows four distinct stories about the Cuban population shortly before the Revolution.

Production

Shortly after the 1959 Cuban Revolution overthrew the United States-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, the socialist Castro government, isolated by the United States after the latter broke diplomatic and trade relations in 1961, turned to the USSR in many areas, including for film partnerships.

The director was given considerable freedom to complete the work, and was given much help from both the Soviet and Cuban governments. Among his inspirations for the project was Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished ¡Que viva México!, another Soviet project about a post-revolutionary Latin American nation. Among Kalatozov's Cuban collaborators on the project were screenwriter Enrique Pineda Barnet and composer Carlos Fariñas.

The film made use of many innovative techniques, such as coating a watertight camera's lens with a special submarine periscope cleaner, so the camera could be submerged and lifted out of the water without any drops on the lens or film. At one point, more than 1,000 Cuban soldiers were moved to a remote location to shoot one scene.

In another scene, the camera follows a flag over a body, held high on a stretcher, along a crowded street. Then it stops and slowly moves upwards for at least four storeys until it is filming the flagged body from above a building. Without stopping, it then starts tracking sideways and enters through a window into a cigar factory, then goes straight towards a rear window where the cigar workers are watching the procession.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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