Sunday 20 September 2009

I am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth (2005 Vincenta Ferraz)

And a documentary about Soy Cuba ('a Siberian mammoth found in the Caribbean sand') reveals the dominance of Urusevsky, who sounds like the driving force from many stories ("move this waterfall ... we'll wait three days until there are clouds in the sky") though as the film ultimately bombed* and disappeared, he and Kalatozov never recovered (Urusevsky shot only two more films and died at 66). Scorsese and Coppola rescued it in the nineties.

*The Cubans thought the tempo of the film was not Cuban; there was too much American decadence for the Soviets.

There's also a nice understatement about "we had to shoot some of the scenes more than once..." Indeed.

P.S. Infra red film used to get those incredible skies!

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