“A black-and-white wonderment that tells the story of the revolution with squealing trumpets, restless drums and astonishing cinematography... It is a story told with a camera as deliriously liberated as the Cuban people would prove enslaved.”
– Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“DON’T MISS! Devastating.”
– Time Out New York

“A mixture of socialist realism and baroque bravura that plays like agitprop on acid.
– Michael Sragow, The New Yorker

“One of the most visually titanic works in the century of movies.”
– Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice

(1964) Havana, late 50s. Helicopter-borne, the camera swoops from a dark sea over a lush tropical island, its palm trees like white feathers against an almost equally dark sky; then, aboard a punt, goes through and under a village on stilts amid the wetlands. A band plays party music during a fashion show atop a skyscraper as the camera slides down to a rooftop swimming pool, and follows a dark-haired bikinied beauty into and under the water. And that’s just the beginning. Following a triumphant comeback with Cannes Palme d’Or winner The Cranes Are Flying, director Mikhail Kalatozov, along with legendary poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, screenwriter Enrique Pineda Barnet and cameramaestro Sergei Urusevsky, came to Cuba to do for the 1959 revolution what Eisenstein had done for 1917’s. And it seems that‘s just what the filmmakers suceeded in doing, as U.S. fatcats romance bargirls in an exotic nightclub; a farmer torches his cane crop against an all-encompassing sky; student revolutionaries lead massive crowds against cop firehoses; and, as bombs fall, a poor guajiro abandons his family to join a defiant revolution... all amid a riot of innovative photography, rapid-fire cutting, screen-filling close-ups, hair-raising handheld tracking shots, crane shots, elevator shots, how-did-they-do-it shots... But the result displeased both the stylistically-uptight Soviet authorities and the Cuban moviegoing public, who groused ¡No soy Cuba!, and the movie soon fell into obscurity. Flash-forward three decades later: following screenings at the Telluride and San Francisco film festivals, and with championing by Coppola and Scorsese, I Am Cuba at last received U.S. distribution and began a smash run at Film Forum on March 8, 1995. For this 10th anniversary of its rediscovery, here is the landmark film in a new print, with all new subtitles and with a new soundtrack eliminating that pesky overdub which once gave an unwelcome instant Russian translation of the Spanish dialogue.
A MILESTONE FILMS RELEASE

I AM CUBA:
THE SIBERIAN MAMMOTH

“An enormously valuable look at the history of this amazing, once-forgotten film.”
 – Bilge Ebiri, New York magazine

A fascinating capsule of an era long past... It's to his credit that you don't have to see "I Am Cuba" to appreciate "Siberian Mammoth." And that you'll undoubtedly want to.”
– Elizabeth Weitzman, Daily News

A worthy celebration and making-of about Kalatozov's hallucinatory film.”
– John Anderson, Newsday 

(2004) So how did they pull off those eye-popping shots in I Am Cuba? Now Brazilian director Vicente Ferraz, using interviews with surviving cast and crew, combined with clips and behind-the-scenes archival footage, comes as close as possible to solving the film’s many mysteries. “One good movie deserves another… As Ferraz contacts the various survivors, he brings news of the long delayed appreciation of their efforts, providing a gratifying emotional payoff.” – Robert Keser. The documentary’s subtitle derives from a vintage J. Hoberman bon mot in his original Village Voice review: “I Am Cuba is as unexpected a find as a Siberian woolly mammoth preserved beneath the sands of a cocoanut grove.”
A CINEMA TROPICAL RELEASE