"Watching this, I got excited about film-making again," says Martin Scorsese, in an interview on the DVD. He got involved with Francis Coppola in putting this rapturously shot black-and-white film about the Cuban revolution back into circulation. Made by celebrated Soviet film-maker Mikhail Kalotozov, who directed The Cranes Are Flying in the 50s (it won the golden palm at Cannes), it was left on the shelf following the switch from Khrushchev to Brezhnev. It's roughly in the style of Russia's glorious workers propaganda movies but often with wild noir-accented camera angles like a child's eye from a fledgling new country post-Castro (who was then prime minister, not president). It seems to be aimed at Americans. "For you, I am casinos, bars, hotels," the viewer is told, and it has a couple of crude early sequences in which Americans condescend crassly to nightclub hookers and sailors harass women in the streets (the Americans are badly acted as though locals couldn't bring themselves to do a proper job as Yanqui imperialists).

Capitalism takes a kicking too: "I've sold the land. Your home isn't yours any more," a sugarcane field boss tells his workers. Rebels are on the way to save this despoiled paradise, via a Spartacus moment in which threatened peasants all insist: "I'm Fidel". All of this might be risible but for the film's style, a weird mash-up of The Battle of Algiers and Alphaville, which constantly makes you look again. It's a magic realist Caribbean, as if Kalatozov is drunk on all this sun and freedom: it feels like an exotic holiday movie from a rum-drenched tourist who has kicked the snow off his boots and couldn't quite believe what he was seeing and its delirium comes across to the viewer. Scorsese says that if this had been seen when it was made, in 1964, the course of cinema would have been different and you can see what he means: this is an invigorating snapshot of a revolution in progress.