I Am Cuba

I Am Cuba (Soy Cuba, 1964) is a Soviet-Cuban co-production directed by Mikhail Kalatozov that you can watch online on iFILM. Cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky shot the entire film on a handheld camera — diving from rooftops into crowds, gliding through casino floors, sinking beneath the surface of a swimming pool, all in a single unbroken take. Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko co-wrote the Russian screenplay.

Four separate stories, four lives caught in the months before January 1959. A young woman selling herself to American tourists at Havana's glittering hotels. A tenant farmer whose sugarcane fields are taken away for the last time. A university student who picks up a Molotov cocktail for the first time. A mountain peasant whom the revolution simply arrives to collect, before he's had a chance to choose.

The film was shelved for nearly thirty years, then rediscovered in the early 1990s when Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola championed its restoration and release. Urusevsky's camerawork is now taught as a technical benchmark in film schools worldwide. Watch I Am Cuba (1964) online on iFILM.