Sunday, August 2 at 5:00 PM – Gene Siskel Film Center – 164 N State St
Tickets: $14 at the door or purchase in advance
I AM CUBA
Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov • 1964
In Russian and Spanish with English subtitles
“Amazingly poetic and terminally wrongheaded,” proclaimed the Chicago Reader‘s Jonathan Rosenbaum when this cast-off artifact of Communist camp-propaganda was finally released to U.S. audiences in 1995. “Undeniably monstrous and breathtakingly beautiful, ridiculous and awe-inspiring.” After the revolution of 1959 put Fidel Castro in power, his new government partnered with the USSR for military support, food assistance, and yes, cinema. The Soviet government tapped Kalatozov, along with his The Cranes Are Flying cinematographer Sergey Urusevsky, to helm this co-production, in which four moral fables (set in Batista’s pre-revolution Cuba) unfold, all illustrating the urgent need for a socialist uprising. The film, despite electrifying camera movements and a uniquely bizarre high-contrast B&W look, was unsuccessful in both Cuba and the USSR — but eventually found a rabid art-house audience in America some thirty years later, after being championed by capitalist tastemakers Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. (GW)
141 min • Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos (ICAIC) / Mosfilm • 35mm from the Chicago Film Society, permission Kino Lorber
Preceded by: 1964 trailer reel – 10 min – 35mm from the Chicago Film Society
“They’re going to be carrying ravished film students out of the theaters on stretchers.”
– Terrence Rafferty, The New Yorker
NEXT UP: Technicolor Weekend! August 7 – 9 at Siskel Film Center