Thursday Cinema
Soy Cuba
[I Am Cuba]

SALT Beyoğlu, Walk-in Cinema

Soy Cuba [I Am Cuba] (1964)
Director: Mikhail Kalatozov
140 minutes
Spanish; Turkish and English subtitles

A prostitute solicits in a posh nightclub but lives in a derelict slum in Havana while a disenfranchised sugarcane farmer is driven to burn his precious produce in despair; an angst-ridden student ponders the use of violence as means of resistance and an apolitical peasant is driven to join Castro’s brigades. These four episodes, narrated by a woman who identifies herself as Cuba, chart the course of a nation’s fate from colonialist subjugation to popular revolution.

Completed in 1964, and not anticipating its poor reception, it was not until the 1990s that Soy Cuba [I Am Cuba] was rediscovered by Martin Scorsese and that the film was campaigned for restoration and eventually re-released.

Describing it a “visual poem,” Scorsese explains that director Mikhail Kalatozov’s work awakened the desire to continue making films and that he intented this feeling to reach a younger generation of filmmakers.


Program is free. Reservations are not accepted.

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