Sightlines · reception
How I Am Cuba was received
1964 · Mikheil Kalatozishvili · I Am Cuba on Sightlines
The arc
Rejected on release by both its co-producers — Cubans found it exoticizing, Soviets found it insufficiently rousing — it sat in obscurity for three decades until a 1995 US re-release presented by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola turned it into a canonical object of cinephile awe.
What’s debated
The eternal I Am Cuba debate: is it pure cinema that transcends its propaganda brief, or gorgeous 'empty formalism' — style so overwhelming it swallows the politics it was built to serve?
Its footprint
Its impossible tracking shots — the camera descending from a rooftop bar straight into a swimming pool, or floating out of a cigar factory window over a funeral procession — are among the most referenced camera moves ever, with filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson openly riffing on the pool shot in Boogie Nights.
Where it stands
A permanent fixture on 'greatest cinematography of all time' lists and a Letterboxd rite of passage — the film people show you when they want to prove the camera can do anything.
Did you know? Both of its sponsor nations disowned it: Cuban audiences reportedly nicknamed it 'I Am Not Cuba,' and the film was effectively shelved for some 30 years before its Scorsese/Coppola-championed 1995 revival — its screenplay co-written by the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.