A Cuban student walks into an anti-government demonstration with a stone in his hand.

As water pumps rain down on him to disperse the demonstrators, he slowly and steadily advances towards the police side.

The student draws the attention of a policeman who is watching the situation.

While the policeman smokes his cigar, he points his pistol at the young man and shoots, so the young man staggers a little and the stone falls from his hand, but he continues to walk through the pouring water before his funeral turns into a popular march in the country.

Carrying their colleague's coffin, the students walked through the streets of the old country amid waves of people, majestic silence, and the residents scattering flowers from their balconies.

The camera follows the funeral procession, the women standing on the balconies, and the cigar workers engrossed in their work on top of the buildings, in one continuous shot, one of the most important cinematic shots of the modern era, which was the fruit of the Soviet film "I am Cuba" directed by Soviet director Mikhail Kalatuzov in 1964.

Students carrying their colleague's coffin walked through the streets of the old country amid waves of people (Getty Images)

The film came out as a co-production between the Cuban Institute of Arts and Film Industry (ICAIC) and the Russian film production studio Mosfilm to promote the communist revolution in Cuba at the time.

The film highlighted the situation of Cuba before the revolution as a mere brothel for drinking and prostitution for American tourists, and the contrast between the conditions of these tourists in luxury hotels and the conditions of poor peasants on farms.

However, the film was withdrawn from the screening after one week in Cuba due to the lack of demand for it because it simplifies the Cuban suffering, and in Russia the same thing happened due to a public failure of the film.

Then the film disappeared for 30 years before it was restored by American directors Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, to reach his fame because of the creativity of his portrayal and his distinctive cinematic language that was ahead of his era.

The conflict with the Soviet Union remained present in American films such as the 2015 movie “War of Spies” starring Tom Hanks, which dealt with a spy case that took place in 1957 in the United States about an American lawyer assigned by the CIA to defend a person accused of spying for Moscow

A co-production between the Cuban Institute of Arts and Film Industry (ICAIC) and the Russian Film Production Studio Foundation (Mosfilm) (IMDB).

This film is one of the signs of Soviet cinema, which disappeared with time, but it was and still is a milestone in the history of cinema in the world, both objectively and artistically.

It also represented one of the aspects of the conflict between the eastern and western camps, before this cinematic conflict re-emerged with the intensification of the battles between Russia and Ukraine.

Objectively speaking, Russian cinema aimed not only at entertainment, but also with what it called the education of the working class and the promotion of revolution.

And education here, in which the political promotion of communism is mixed with socialist values ​​and general human principles, to be shortened by many critics under the abbreviated title of political propaganda films or propaganda, and it was called at the time revolutionary cinema.

Lenin used to say, "The cinema is the most important art for us among all the arts", at a time when the cinema was taking its first steps and not as widespread as it happened afterwards.

The theory of image editing or montage emerged from the womb of Soviet cinema, and one of its most prominent pioneers was the famous director Sergei Eisenstein, who drew attention to a different method of visual narration different from the serial narration in the style of American films.

He believed that the cinematic shot is an independent unit and can interact with other shots in order to build a coherent cinematic and not necessarily an expression of a story.

The Soviet film, according to this theory, is primarily made in the montage room, and may use the method of intellectual montage that does not aim to convey the event as much as it aims to arouse emotion by using certain symbols of peoples, cultures and ideas.

The conflict with Russia cinematically

Soviet cinema did not enjoy a spread comparable to the spread of American Hollywood cinema, yet the conflict with the Russians remained present in the stories of American cinema films, and cinematic punishment remained a present weapon against the Russians that Hollywood recently used to prevent its films in Russian cinemas.

Despite the end of the Cold War era, the conflict with the Soviet Union remained present in American films such as the movie “War of Spies” directed by Steven Spielberg in 2015 starring the famous actor Tom Hanks, which dealt with a spy case that took place in 1957 in the United States about an American lawyer appointed by an agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to defend a person accused of spying for Moscow.

The themes of these films dealt with the conflict between the two international poles at the height of their power, as well as the war of ideas and ideologies even within the United States itself.

In the same year (2015), Hollywood screened the movie "Trumbo" by American director Jay Roach about the life of the communist American scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo, who and others were subjected to discrimination and persecution in Hollywood during the macabre era because of their political affiliations and were writing American film scripts under pseudonyms.

During the past two decades, Russian cinema began to recover again after the stagnation witnessed in the nineties during the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the names and projects of major films and even independent films emerged.

And the Russian-Ukrainian war came to impose a new challenge on it after a single decision to ban American films from Russian cinemas caused losses estimated at millions of Russian rubles.

The decision represented a painful blow to more than half of the cinemas in the country, which the Russian Cinema Owners Association expected would cause bankruptcy and close its doors by the end of this year.

This is in addition to the technical punishment of preventing Russian films from participating in famous international film festivals this year, such as the Cannes Film Festival in France, and the Glasgow Film Festival in Britain decided to withdraw two Russian films from its list.

The Russian Film Academy, for its part, took a proactive step, and announced that it would not nominate any films to compete for the American Academy Awards scheduled for next year 2023. Ideas of replacing Indian films and Bollywood cinemas with American films have been put forward, but it seems that the matter is more complicated than that, and the cinematic isolation that imposed by the West on Moscow has already begun to harm the cultural sector financially and technically.