I Am Cuba

Poetry meets propaganda in Mikhail Kalatozov's delirious tribute to the Cuban revolution. Ostensibly a collaboration between Russian and Cuban artists, this cinematically audacious and visually extravagant film is a political tract gone native, a film lost in the faces and the tropical landscape of Cuba as reimagined by a Russian filmmaker intoxicated by the Caribbean culture and music. The four stories chart the road to revolution through portraits of poverty and colonial decadence that keep the Cuban citizens prisoners of injustice until they embark on revolution. But it's the thrilling beauty and primal imagery that you remember. The form is undeniably European (the Cuban style of the time belonged more to the magic realism of Cinema Novo and the low-budget ingenuity of the French New Wave), and the culture clash of Soviet paternalism and aesthetics and Cuban stories and settings that makes this film such a fascinating document was not embraced back in 1965. It was derided in Cuba, dismissed in Russia, and all but suppressed by both countries when they filed it away and forget about it, until it was rediscovered and revived in an American film festival screening almost 30 years later.

The three-disc set includes the "The Siberian Mammoth," a comprehensive documentary on the making of the film. Made in 2005 by Vicente Ferraz, this Cuban production sets the film in the context of the excitement of the nascent Cuban film movement. But behind the praise that the Cuban actors, crewmen and collaborators heap on director Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky is an undercurrent of incredulousness at their working methods and disappointment in the exoticization and eroticization of their country's history and culture by the artists from cold Mother Russia. Also features "A Film About Mikhail Kalatozov," the 2006 documentary portrait of the director by his grandson, Mikhail Kalatozishvili, a 30-minute interview with Russian poet and screenwriter Yevgeni Yevtushenko conducted in 2004, and a 26-minute interview with Martin Scorsese, whose sponsorship helped launch the film's 1995 American release. Milestone has boxed the three discs, each in a separate thinpak case, and the 14-page booklet "I Am Cuba: The True Story" (which features archival writings and a new essay on the making of the film) in a mock cigar box.