Begun in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I Am Cuba is a startlingly photographed tale of revolutionary zeal. Simon Hudson rediscovers this lost masterpiece that influenced Scorsese and Coppola.

About seven years ago, while I was studying a cinematography masterclass, I was shown my first frames of the film Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba), given some intimate details of how this production was photographed, and told by the tutor from LA, 'You must get this on video!'. I then spent months trying to get a copy, but could only find one in NTSC, the American standard. It took me another six months to find a VHS player that could play the tape. But when I did finally sit down to watch this film it immediately leapt into my top five films of all time, and I think it could possibly be one of the top three best-photographed films ever made.

Ordinary people
It's a tale of ordinary people in Cuba in the time of Batista, leading up to the revolution and Castro's triumphant march into Havana. By telling the tragic stories of ordinary people, it draws us into the human reasons and truths behind the need for change and the desperation of finding a soul which Cuba had never identified before; a soul dying to break free.

It tells four interlinked tales: A sugar cane farmer who loses everything when the landlord sells the land he farms to the United Food Company; a student who joins the revolutionary intelligentsia and then cannot kill the brutal police captain after seeing him with his children, and later dies at his hand; a young woman whose fiancé sees her in bed with a foreign businessman, and realises that she is a prostitute; and a peasant family man with no political leanings who joins the rebel forces after seeing one of his children blown up in a Batista air bombardment.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 109.