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I Am Cuba film image; woman with a shadow over her face

“They’re going to be carrying ravished film students out of the theaters on stretchers,” wrote Terrence Rafferty in the New Yorker when this astonishing Soviet-made portrait of Castro’s Cuba was rediscovered in the mid 1990s. Featuring some of the jaw-dropping camerawork ever filmed (and decades before the invention of the Steadicam), the movie is a euphoric celebration of Cuba, the Revolution, and (most potently) revolutionary cinema.

In the early 60s Fidel Castro welcomed radical filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker and Cesare Zavattini to witness his new socialist Cuba, but it was the Russian Mikhail Kalatozov and his collaborators who produced what now looks like the revolution’s most extraordinary art work.

Infused with a palpable love for the country and a righteous anger at the injustices of the Batista era, I Am Cuba is a propaganda picture in four narrative sections. In the first, three ugly American businessmen carouse with prostitutes in a bar; in another, a tenant farmer torches the land that has been sold out from under him; a third features a radical student protester; and the fourth shows a peasant farmer take up a rifle after his son is killed in a air strike on the rebels.

The stories are simple polemic, but they assume real power from the spare script by poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and especially from the lyrical, sensuous traveling shots composed by cameraman Sergei Urusevsky, probably the real genius in the team. Using infrared stock, elaborate systems of cranes, cables and pulleys, a wide-angle lens and a blindfold (which he would remove shortly before filming to keep his eye fresh) Urusevsky conjured a fluid, floating dream of Cuba – and a unique aesthetic experience decades ahead of its time.

Sunday’s Pantheon screening will feature a 20-minute introduction and talkback.

A classic… absolutely astonishing! I Am Cuba is that rarity of rarities, a genuine hidden treasure. It puts to shame anything we’re doing today.

Martin Scorsese

One of the most deliriously beautiful films ever made.

Manohla Dargis, LA Weekly

Some of the most exhilarating camera movements and most luscious black-and-white cinematography you’ll ever see.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Director

Mikhail Kalatozov

Cast

Sergio Corrieri, Salvador Wood, José Gallardo, Raúl García

Country of Origin

Cuba/USSR

Year

1964

Language

In English and Spanish with English subtitles

19+
141 min

Book Tickets

Sunday September 21

11:00 am
Guests/Q&As Hearing Assistance Subtitles
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
Book Now

Tuesday September 23

7:30 pm
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre
Book Now

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The Wild Bunch (Director's Cut)

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The Ascent
The Ascent film image; man leaning into another man's face

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Bicycle Thieves

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VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre

The Cloud-Capped Star

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VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre

I Am Cuba

Dir. Mikhail Kalatozov
141 min

Infused with a palpable love for the country and a righteous anger at the injustices of the Batista era, I Am Cuba features some of the jaw-dropping camerawork ever filmed. A euphoric celebration of Cuba, the Revolution, and revolutionary cinema.

VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre

Woman in the Dunes (35mm)

Dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara
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VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre

The Colour of Pomegranates + The House Is Black

Dir. Sergei Parajanov
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VIFF Centre - Vancity Theatre