Connolly Books Film Club presents ‘I am Cuba’

‘I Am Cuba’ (Soy Cuba) was both a landmark of radical political cinema and one of the most visually ravishing films ever made. A legendary hymn to revolution shimmers across the screen like a fever dream of rebellion. 

The result of an extraordinarily ambitious collaboration between the Soviet and Cuban film industries, director Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba unfolds in four explosive vignettes that capture Cuban life on the brink of transformation, as crushing economic exploitation and inequality give way to a working-class uprising. 

Backed by Carlos Fariñas’s stirring score, the dazzling camera work by Sergei Urusevsky—an inspiration for generations of filmmakers to follow—gives flight to the movie’s message of liberation