Westbeth Movie Night
I Am Cuba

I Am Cuba is a 1964 film directed by Mikhail Kalatozov.

An international co-production between the Soviet Union and Cuba, it was not received well by either the Russian or Cuban public, and was almost completely forgotten until it was re-discovered by filmmakers Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola who after seeing its acrobatic tracking shots and idiosyncratic mise en scene prompted their 1990s campaign to restore the film.

The movie consists of four distinct short stories about the suffering of the Cuban people and their reactions, varying from passive amazement in the first, to a guerrilla march in the last. Between the stories, a female narrator (credited “The Voice of Cuba”) says such things as, “I am Cuba, the Cuba of the casinos, but also of the people.”

Westbeth Movie Night is a free public event sponsored by the Westbeth Artists Residents Council. It is a series of films curated by filmmaker Ethan Maas that are significant, brilliant, sometimes forgotten, but always memorable.