I Am Cuba (1964)
There are films that travel, and there are films that get lost. I Am Cuba (or Soy Cuba, as it was titled on release) belongs to a peculiar third category: films that simply vanished, only to be rediscovered decades later and treated as if they had been divine transmissions all along. Shot in 1964 as a co-production between the Soviet studio Mosfilm and Cuba's own ICAIC, the film was screened briefly and then quietly shelved, considered too avant-garde by Soviet critics and too condescending about Cuban life by the Cubans themselves. It gathered dust for nearly thirty years until American directors Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese helped arrange its re-release in 1995, at which point the world belatedly caught up with what cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky had been doing with a camera. If you want a sense of how Cuba looked and felt to outsiders during that same era, the documentary Cuba and the Cameraman makes for an interesting companion piece, though it arrives at its subject from an entirely different angle.
The director, Mikhail Kalatozov, was no newcomer to ambitious Soviet filmmaking. His 1957 war film The Cranes Are Flying had won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and he had spent years developing a visual language that prioritised kinetic, almost physical camera movement over the more static grammar of conventional cinema. Working alongside Urusevsky, whose lens work here is by any measure extraordinary, Kalatozov structures the film as four loosely connected vignettes, each centred on a different Cuban character caught up in the social tensions that preceded the 1959 revolution. The film was shot on location around Havana and the surrounding countryside, giving it a texture that studio recreations simply cannot manufacture. The budget is not widely documented in precise figures, but the production was plainly a substantial state investment from both countries, and it shows in the scale and ambition of individual sequences. For those familiar with other Soviet filmmaking of the period, including earlier works like Earth by Alexander Dovzhenko or the eerie domestic horror of Viy, Kalatozov's approach sits within a recognisable tradition of treating the camera itself as a political and aesthetic instrument, pushing it to places it was not necessarily built to go.
The cast is drawn largely from non-professional actors alongside a handful of Cuban stage performers. Sergio Corrieri, who would go on to become one of Cuba's most respected actors and later a significant cultural diplomat, appears in the student segment. Salvador Wood, José Gallardo, Raúl García, and Luz María Collazo fill out the other vignettes, each bringing an earnestness to their roles that suits the film's broad, emblematic characterisation. These are not psychological portraits so much as representative figures, a structural choice that suits propaganda and frustrates realism in roughly equal measure. The film runs to 141 minutes, which is a commitment worth knowing about before you sit down with it.
Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 epic I Am Cuba currently sits as the 29th highest-rated film of all time on Letterboxd, a staggering accolade that sets expectations impossibly high.
Visually, it absolutely earns a chunk of that reverence and it's undeniably one of the most visually striking films I have ever laid eyes on. The sweeping, gravity-defying camera movements and the stark, high-contrast black-and-white cinematography are nothing short of revolutionary. However, the moment you press play, the illusion of cinematic perfection is immediately punctured by a rather jarring, high-pitched whistle that drones over the audio during practically every outdoor scene. It’s a glaring technical flaw that reminds you this is a messy, complicated production, not a flawless relic.
Then there is the matter of pacing, which honestly tests your patience to its absolute limits. I typically have a soft spot for episodic films, and there is a certain, disjointed charm to how this picture jumps between different vignettes of pre-revolutionary Cuban life. But when nearly a quarter of the film’s entire runtime is dedicated to a single, meandering nightclub dance sequence where very little actually happens, you start to wonder if the editor simply fell asleep at the wheel. It’s a bold, avant-garde choice, sure, but it drags the narrative momentum down into a sluggish crawl long before the more politically charged segments even kick in.
When the film does decide to move, its intentions are laid bare with a heavy, unapologetic hand. This is, at its core, a blatant piece of Soviet-Cuban propaganda, designed to stoke the fires of revolution by highlighting the grotesque wealth of the elite against the suffering of the working class. While I can appreciate the historical context and the sheer audacity of the filmmaking, the messaging is so on-the-nose that it occasionally feels more like a political lecture than a compelling narrative. The non-professional cast does a great job with the material, but they are often swallowed whole by the sheer, overwhelming scale of Kalatozov’s directorial ambitions and the clunky, uneven sound mixing.
I Am Cuba is a fascinating if flawed paradox of a movie. It is a visual triumph that is constantly tripping over its own technical and narrative shoelaces. Kalatozov crafted a piece of cinema that will absolutely blow you away with its sheer aesthetic ambition, but you have to be willing to wade through the tedious pacing and the audio hiccups to get there. It’s a cracking, historically vital watch for any serious film buff, even if it doesn't quite live up to the stratospheric, untouchable status it enjoys on modern ranking lists.
I Am Cuba occupies an odd place in film history precisely because its reputation rests almost entirely on its imagery rather than on what it actually says or how it says it. The visual achievements are real and well-documented, and no serious conversation about cinematography can ignore what Urusevsky accomplished here. But as this review makes clear, a film's standing on a ranking list and its watchability as an experience are rather different things. Kalatozov made something genuinely strange and occasionally exhausting, a polished but uneven piece of political cinema that rewards patience in some sequences and tests it severely in others. For anyone drawn to the intersections of ideology and image, it sits alongside Come and See as one of Soviet-era cinema's more extreme formal gambles, though with rather more mixed results. Worth the time, but perhaps not the pedestal.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1964 | Watched: 2026-07-16
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for I Am Cuba (1964) on YouTube
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