Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov’s account of the Castro revolution is one of the great forgotten movies of the 1960s.

Kalatozov, born in Georgia and praised for his film The Cranes are Flying (1957), set out to create a Cuban film as powerful as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, and a rallying point for a nascent revolution. With a script by the Soviet Union’s internationally famed poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko and Cuban author Enrique Pineda Barnet, I Am Cuba’s four dramatic stories take place in the final days of the Batista regime. The first two illustrate the ills that led to the revolution, the third and fourth the call to arms which cut across social and economic lines.

So much more than Soviet agitprop, I Am Cuba is a brilliant evocation of both the vibrant atmosphere of the island, and of that extraordinary decade when Cubans moved out of the American sphere and began to carve out a new world of their own imagining.

Presented in partnership with Bristol Festival of Ideas with support from Bristol Radical Film Festival.

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