What It's About:

This sensuous, visually ravishing celebration of pre-revolutionary Cuba hinges on four dramatic vignettes: A beautiful woman's encounter with a crass American businessman in a Havana nightclub; a tenant farmer who loses his crop to a giant conglomerate; and two men, a middle-class student and a peasant, who join Castro's fight against the Batista regime.

Why I Love It:

Rescued from the dustbin of history by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese and released in 1995, Russian director Kalatozov's sweeping, stylized "I Am Cuba" is communist agit-prop, to be sure-but also exhilarating, world-class art. Swooping over sugar fields, through dense forests and urban milieu of both the decadent and militant variety, Kalatozov portrays the beauty of Cuba and its people via a quartet of loose, dreamy, near-wordless stories--all set to the beat of pulsing Afro-Cuban music.