I am Cuba (Soy Cuba) 1964 141 min

The film is divided into four distinct chapters which provide a roadmap of Cuba's journey towards revolution. The country's victimization at the hands of an economically and socially rapacious America is bared to see. A young girl from the slums is used for sex by a hypocritical tourist, while a hardworking farmer loses his sugar cane crop to the monstrous United Fruit Company. Elsewhere, an idealistic student is made a martyr by the police and a peaceful mountain family lose a baby son to bombs from the sky. "I Am Cuba," Mikhail Kalatozov's 1964 masterpiece is a visually stunning piece of filmmaking - slash - fascinating historical artifact. It is the first and only Soviet-Cuban cinematic collaboration.
Dir. Mikhail Kalazov Cuba/USSR 1964
This Soviet/Cuban collaboration is a kaleidoscopic expose of Cuba during the time of Batista. It portrays a land of diametric opposites - great wealth and abject poverty. The political agenda is unapologetic. Within a structure of four short stories of hardship and abuse, it presents the crushing exploitation of Cuba¹s people and resources, revealing the underlying causes of Castro¹s revolution. Epic tracking shots and an array of images in high contrast black and white poetically convey the conflicting lifestyles of the monied elite and the barely subsisiting underclass. Lyrical, joyous yet harsh and unwavering, I Am Cuba is a dazzling work.