Posted by: ivetteromero | October 3, 2010Previously Unpublished Documents Brought to Light in Documentary “Che, un hombre nuevo”
In a tape recording you can hear the voice of Ernesto “Che” Guevara saying, “And now for you, Aleida, what is most deeply mine and the deepest part of both of us,” and the poems of Martínez Villena, César Vallejo, and Pablo Neruda, manifesting a very different tone from the that of his political speeches. With the aim to take the viewer “on a voyage through the memories, thought, and poetry of the famed guerrilla fighter, Argentine filmmaker Tristán Bauer exposes intimate and unpublished details like this in his new documentary Che, un hombre nuevo [Che, a new man]. The Cuban government also contributed 20 unpublished photographs for this film.
The poetic reading mentioned above was Guevara’s farewell to his wife, Aleida March, after giving up his leadership of the Communist Party, his ministerial post, and his rank as Commander, right before his departure for Africa. In an interview to with Argentina’s Revista Veintitrés, the director said that this is one of the most emotional moments of the film.
Winner in the Best Documentary category at the 2010 Festival of World Film in Montreal, Canada, in September, the film premieres today (October 3) in Rosario, Argentina, where Che was born, and travels to the rest of the country on October 7, as part of the commemorations of the 43 year anniversary of the assassination of Che Guevara in Bolivia. On this same date, the film will premiere in Cuban theaters. Starting on October 29, the fill will screen in Spain, which teamed up with Cuba to produce the film.
About his motivation to undertake this audiovisual project, Bauer explained that at first the idea was to embark on a fictional feature film; but one day, walking along Havana’s Malecón (sea wall), Che’s nephew, Taco Guevara, told him that this was a mistake, that it was better to make a documentary with all those unknown materials of Che. “Because according to him, Che would be upset by all this stuff about the heroic guerrilla that somehow, added to the Korda photo, had masked his deepest thoughts and capacity for constant analysis beyond his concrete action.”
The filmmaker explains his fascination at “seeing how such action, which in his short life, was coupled with a thought transformed into word. Because Che is a model of a man. While I believe that all men should have the same possibilities, not all men are equal, and there are some that [seem to be] touched by a magic wand. He was a being, as Silvio Rodríguez would say, from another galaxy. And, nevertheless, he was a human being, with all black holes that men may have. [He was] a man who left an indelible mark.”
Almost two hours long, this documentary, written by Bauer and Carolina Scaglione, shows for the first time on screen a more intimate documentation than ever before by Che’s wife Aleida March and their children. Thus, all the writings, recordings, and literary narratives, present a more human dimension of Ernesto Guevara. To reconstruct the man behind the legend, it took the filmmaker 12 years to follow leads in Bolivia, Cuba, the territories of the former Czechoslovakia, and the United States. “Rather than a flat documentary research, it was the work of an archaeologist, because with the passing of time, we were discovering clues that led us to others, small pieces that were helping us discover the character.”
For full article (in Spanish), see http://alocubano.nireblog.com/post/2010/10/02/documentos-ineditos-a-la-luz-en-el-documental-che-un-hombre-nuevo#more
Photo from http://www.caras.com.br/imagens/73886/em/noticias/12458/foto-de-aleida-march-e-che-guevara
