Cuban Film Series Screening (3 of 4)
Date(s): Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Time(s): 7:00 PM
Soy Cuba (I am Cuba), a 1964 black-and-white cinematic masterpiece directed by Mikhail Kalatozov was re-discovered and is the first movie ever jointly presented by master filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. Presented at the Sundance, the Cannes, and the San Francisco International Film Festivals, Soy Cuba has received standing ovations and critical acclaim. It is hailed as one of the great discoveries in cinema.
"A film that puts faith in cinema." —Martin Scorsese
Written by renowned poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and novelist Enrique Pineda Barnet, Soy Cuba shows off Sergei Urusevsky's cinematography finesse as he uses wide-angle lenses that distort and magnify, achieving wild gravity-defying angles as his acrobatic camera glides effortlessly from vignette to vignette.
Soy Cuba is the story of an island stricken by poverty and violence that accreted into a glowing celebration of revolutionary ideals and riotous call to arms, exploring the innermost feelings of the characters and their often desperate situations. The plot consists of four interlinked tales: a young woman's would-be lover realizes she is a prostitute; a sugar cane farmer loses everything to the oppressive United Fruit Company; an idealistic college student stands up against the iron-handed police; an air strike on the peaceful hillside home of a peasant family causes a father in retaliation to take up arms against Batista.
Soy Cuba ushers you into the seductive, decadent (and marvelously photogenic) world of Batista's Cuba, in the period leading up to the revolution in 1959, when foreign capitalist influence runs rampant, economically stratifying the people into a decadent leisure class that revels in the spoils of Western civilization and a working class that toils day by day feeling the echoes of colonialism; a delirious juxtaposing of rich Americans and bikini-clad beauties sipping cocktails poolside with scenes of ramshackle slums filled with hungry children and gaunt old people.
"GRIPPING" —The Guardian
"SPECTACULAR! VISUALLY STUNNING" —Stephen Holden, The New York Times
"A SENSUOUSLY BEAUTIFUL MOVIE. A hymn to the liberation of appetite... IRRESISTIBLE!" —David Denby, New York Magazine
This event is free and open to the public.
Location: Sheldon
