"Amazingly poetic and terminally wrongheaded," proclaimed the Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum when this cast-off artifact of Communist camp-propaganda was finally released to U.S. audiences in 1995. "Undeniably monstrous and breathtakingly beautiful, ridiculous and awe-inspiring." After the revolution of 1959 put Fidel Castro in power, his new government partnered with the USSR for military support, food assistance, and yes, cinema. The Soviet government tapped Kalatozov, along with his THE CRANES ARE FLYING cinematographer Sergey Urusevsky, to helm this co-production, in which four moral fables (set in Batista's pre-revolution Cuba) unfold, all illustrating the urgent need for a socialist uprising. The film, despite electrifying camera movements and a uniquely bizarre high-contrast B&W look, was unsuccessful in both Cuba and the USSR — but eventually found a rabid art-house audience in America some thirty years later, after being championed by capitalist tastemakers Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.(Gabriel Wallace, Chicago Film Society) 35mm from the Chicago Film Society