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This landmark film by the virtuosic Mikhail Kalatozov was heralded as a revelation in the post-Stalin Soviet Union and the international cinema community alike. It tells the story of Veronica and Boris, a couple who are blissfully in love until the eruption of World War II tears them apart. With Boris at the front, Veronica must try to ward off spiritual numbness and defend herself from the increasingly forceful advances of her beau’s draft-dodging cousin. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival, The Cranes Are Flying is a superbly crafted drama with impassioned performances and viscerally emotional, gravity-defying cinematography by Kalatozov’s regular collaborator Sergei Urusevsky. SPECIAL EDITION BLU-RAY FEATURES • New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack • New interview with scholar Ian Christie on why the film is a landmark of Soviet cinema • Audio interview from 1961 with director Mikhail Kalatozov • Hurricane Kalatozov, a documentary from 2009 on the Georgian director’s complex relationship with the Soviet government • Segment from a 2008 program about the film’s cinematography, featuring original storyboards and an interview with actor Alexei Batalov • Interview from 2001 with filmmaker Claude Lelouch on the film’s French premiere at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival • New English subtitle translation • PLUS: An essay by critic Chris Fujiwara

Description

Both a landmark of radical political cinema and one of the most visually ravishing films ever made, this legendary hymn to revolution shimmers across the screen like a fever dream of rebellion. The result of an extraordinarily ambitious collaboration between the Soviet and Cuban film industries, director Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba unfolds in four explosive vignettes that capture Cuban life on the brink of transformation, as crushing economic exploitation and inequality give way to a working-class uprising. Backed by Carlos Fariñas’s stirring score, the dazzling camera work by Sergei Urusevsky—an inspiration for generations of filmmakers to follow—gives flight to the movie’s message of liberation. BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack “I Am Cuba,” the Siberian Mammoth, a 2004 documentary on the making of the film featuring key participants Interview from 2003 with filmmaker Martin Scorsese New appreciation of the film by cinematographer Bradford Young Trailer Alternate Russian-dubbed soundtrack New English subtitle translation PLUS: An essay by film critic Juan Antonio García Borrero

Description

This visually dazzling film presents four stories of life and revolution in pre-Castro Cuba.