I Am Cuba

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I Am Cuba
Directed by	Mikhail Kalatozov
Written by	Enrique Pineda Barnet Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Produced by	Bela Fridman Semyon Maryakhin Miguel Mendoza
Starring	Sergio Corrieri Salvador Wood José Gallardo Jean Bouise Luz María Collazo
Cinematography	Sergey Urusevsky
Edited by	Nina Glagoleva
Music by	Carlos Fariñas
Distributed by	Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos (ICAIC) Mosfilm
Release dates	1964 (1964) 8 March 1995 (1995-03-08) (U.S.) 22 May 2003 (2003-05-22) (Cannes Film Festival)
Running time	135 minutes / 141 minutes
Countries	Cuba Soviet Union
Languages	Spanish English

I Am Cuba (Spanish: Soy Cuba; Russian: Я - Куба, Ya – Kuba) is a 1964 film directed by Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm. An international co-production between the Soviet Union and Cuba, it is an anthology film mixing political drama and propaganda. It was not received well by either the Russian or Cuban publics^[1] and was almost completely forgotten until it was re-discovered by filmmakers in the United States thirty years later.^[1] The acrobatic tracking shots and idiosyncratic mise-en-scène prompted Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese to begin a campaign to restore the film in the early 1990s.

I Am Cuba is shot in black and white, sometimes using infrared film obtained from the Soviet military^[2] to exaggerate contrast (making trees and sugar cane almost white, and skies very dark but still obviously sunny). Most shots are in extreme wide-angle and the camera passes very close to its subjects, whilst still largely avoiding having those subjects ever look directly at the camera.