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Load of rubbish!!

Blistering performances.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

First, the artistry is too intimidating. It'd be like promoting Dostoyevsky to Dickens fans. Some of the scenes are so beguiling they defy adequate description. But some will think it much too slow, which might have been a good point if it hadn't taken place on a Caribbean island. I was made to feel what it was like to do the tedious work of cutting sugar cane all day and then be thrown into so much despair, you feel you must strike out.Cuba before the revolution was deeply involved with gangsters and criminals, but this film makes no mention of them, showing Batista and American sailors and businessmen as the bad men, mindlessly exploiting the grinding poverty reserved for the peasants. The real delight of this movie is the awe inspiring photography, and especially, the long, no-cut scenes done in an era before steady cams and lightweight equipment. Apparently it was all done with infrared film which the Soviet military had available in abundance. (The greenery is often white as a result.) Regardless, it's really enough to recommend it highly as you will wonder at times why we were denied such beautiful work all these years.

I don't know much about Cuba. I do know that Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cuba is Mike Leigh's third favourite movie, so on that undeniable recommendation, I had to see for myself. The film dramatises the country's urgent need for revolution, as political oppression stirs great discrepancies in the communities. It's formed of four allegorical vignettes, covering many war- torn scenarios; a Cuban woman who sleeps with Americans to make a living, a farmer whose land is taken from him, a rebellious student who rises up against the oppression, and another farmer who realises the only way to get peace is to fight for it after his land is blown apart. Even though characters are clearly symbolic of class divides, ideologies, religions and cultures, Kalatozov's approach still leads it to being an actor's playground, as they tackle tough moral dilemmas and impossible problems often without dialogue.Although it often breaches melodrama, they're always deeply tender. Admittedly, the characters are superficial, obvious regarding what they stand for and too fleetingly presented to get under their skin, but the film manages to conjure the stomp of a nation with its network of active characters. What's most notable about I Am Cuba is the sensational dizzying cinematography. It's constantly mobile, hand-held, with a distorted lens, and it often opts for Dutch angles. But there are some improbable camera moves that made my jaw drop as the camera passes stories and through buildings and across streets. Even in black and white, it has such a hot suffocating atmosphere and captures such tension in the air. Paired with the abrasive music, it's an utterly remarkable experience. This is the type of film i would've fallen head over heels for just a few years ago - now I'm a little more reserved, but consider me floored for I Am Cuba.9/10

Thank you reviewer NIKITIN for bringing some balance to the body of reviews. Soy Cuba's themes are indeed more important than the flashy technique, dazzling as it is. Of course, it's hard not to be overwhelmed by the innovative camera work. And ironically this was at a time when Americans were told that Soviet cinema was nothing more than variations on the stodgy 'boy meets tractor'. Whatever the truth of this-- since their movies were never shown over here-- Soy Cuba shows the spirit of Eisenstein was still alive in some quarters of that huge nation.Actually, the movie could have been much more critical of US policy than it was. For example, the first vignette could have shown that Meyer Lansky and the mob were actually running the casinos and prostitution of Havana—one reason the mob conspired with the CIA to kill Castro. In fact, Cuba under Batista was sometimes called 'America's sewer'. Thus, the movie's revolutionary message should be celebrated along with the terrific cinematic effects. And had the US wanted a genuinely non-aligned Cuba, we could have started by avoiding the embargo, not invading the island, and foregoing efforts to assassinate its leader. Then the island nation might not have had to go halfway around the world to find allies and a trading partner.Anyway, the movie dramatizes key elements of the popular uprising, each vignette standing for a crucial broader dynamic. On the whole, the movie comes as a startling surprise that shouldn't have taken 40-years for the authorities to allow our public to see.

There is a story from the early days of motion pictures, when crowds of people would shriek because a film of a train coming towards the camera was shown. Film is the most powerful of all the arts precisely because of its command over, and our necessarily intimate relationship with, vision. Soy Cuba's occasional brilliance stems from this knowledge. It is not, however, a complete film, but a film of contradictions. It takes freely from verite and expressionism, is subtle and didactic, visually brilliant yet contains heavy- handed symbolism, is enigmatic but clichéd, manipulative and sincere but ultimately entirely engaging. It's a sprawling filmic essay arguing in favour of the revolution of '59 containing four stories that each detail an area of life that needed reform, and as such takes us from the ghettos of Havana to the mountain areas – if it wasn't as interested in the lives of the proletariat, it could be considered an epic. In the end though it is the virtuosity of the cinematography that binds the film together, each story containing brilliantly conceived and executed sequences of visual beauty. This is a film that could have been a masterpiece, but for the overriding ideological aims which often take too much precedence. At its finest, particularly in the first story, this is a film of immense beauty. From the very opening shots, Kalatozov introduces us to what will be the defining style of the film: long, unbroken shots that can seemingly reveal to us any part of this world; he positions us from 'God's eye view', allowing us to move in and out of the images. We are shown the countryside of Cuba, then its canals and finally a swinging party in Havana. At this point no narrative is introduced, and we are asked to merely observe the events we are witnessing; the contrast of the poor countryside to the decadence of Havana offers more than enough of an argument. When we finally do begin the narrative, we follow the character of Maria/Betty as American businessmen in a Cuban brothel/nightclub exploit her. The key to the success of this chapter is that Kalatozov trusts his camera to tell the story – the subtle and convincing naturalistic acting of the cast works perfectly against the enigmatic camera work (in a way, this kind of acting is entirely necessary, for the camera work is so planned, choreographed and manipulated that the naturalism of the performances acts as its anchor). When we see the change of the Maria character, we understand perfectly what has caused it and feel great empathy for her situation. Considering how little time we have spent with her, and how little we know about her biographically, this is a tremendous achievement and one brought about by its lack of didacticism; by allowing the camera to tell the story rather than dialogue, we are forced into engaging with her situation. Unfortunately, this quality of understatement is one that is lost in the rest of the film. Even towards the end of the Maria chapter, we have an exchange involving a cross, which is so explicit in its symbolism that it momentarily undoes the prior good work. This affliction occurs constantly in the next three stories, where dialogue is used to offer us chunks of ideology. Consider the farmer who is told by the landowner that he does not own the land, or the man in the mountain who is told reasons for why the rebels are good for him and his family. The frustration with this didactic dialogue is that is, by and large, unnecessary. Such is the visual skill of the director, as in the first story, we could have easily done without most of the dialogue, and the film would have been equally as comprehensible intellectually, and immeasurably more engaging emotionally. Yet despite this, each of the other stories contain spectacular sequences and moments. Consider the over exposed film used in the second story which make the sugarcane appear ethereally white, yet the sunny day behind menacingly black. Or the shot from a high angle of the dead revolutionary on the street, a crowd of people circling him as his revolutionary pamphlets float in the air, their shadows covering his body. Or take the funeral scene in the third story, which is perhaps one of the great sequences in film. Here we see a camera move with such independence and ease that, 50 years later, it is still mind- blowing. When Soy Cuba trusts its visuals to tell its story, it is quite brilliant, but unfortunately, as is often the case, ideology trumps all else.