Che (film)
Encyclopedia
Che is a two-part 2008 biopic
about Ernesto 'Che' Guevara
directed by Steven Soderbergh
and starring Benicio del Toro
. Rather than follow a standard chronological order, the films offer an oblique series of interspersed moments along the overall timeline. Part One is entitled The Argentine and focuses on the Cuban revolution
from the landing of Fidel Castro
, Guevara, and other revolutionaries on Cuba
to their successful toppling of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista
two years later. Part Two is entitled Guerrilla and focuses on Guevara's attempt to bring revolution to Bolivia
and his demise. Both parts are shot in a cinéma vérité
style, but each has different approaches to linear
narrative
, camerawork
, and the visual look.
Filmmaker Terrence Malick
originally worked on a screenplay limited to Guevara's attempts to start a revolution in Bolivia. When financing fell through, Malick left the project, and subsequently Soderbergh agreed to direct the film. He realized that there was no context for Guevara's actions in Bolivia and decided that his participation in the Cuban revolution and his appearance at the United Nations
in 1964 should also be depicted. Peter Buchman was hired to write the screenplay: the script was so long that Soderbergh decided to divide the film into two parts, one chronicling Cuba and other depicting Bolivia. Soderbergh shot the films back-to-back starting at the beginning of July 2007, with Guerrilla first in Spain
for 39 days, and The Argentine shot in Puerto Rico
and Mexico
for 39 days.
Che was screened as a single film at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival
. Del Toro won the Best Actor Award
, and the film received mostly positive reviews. IFC Films
, which holds all North American rights to Che, initially released the combined film for one week on December 12, 2008 in New York City
and Los Angeles
to qualify for the year's Academy Awards
. Strong box office performance led to the "special roadshow edition"
being extended in New York and Los Angeles and later expanded into additional markets. The film was released as two separate films, titled Che Part 1: The Argentine and Che Part 2: Guerrilla, and distribution expanded further after that. The Independent Film Channel
released the films via video on demand
and on Region 1 DVD exclusively from Blockbuster. As of October 2009, Che parts I and II had grossed US$40,779,241 worldwide.
) is interviewed by Lisa Howard
(Julia Ormond
) who asks him if reform throughout Latin America might not blunt the "message of the Cuban Revolution". In 1955, at a gathering in Mexico City
, Guevara first meets Fidel Castro
(Demian Bichir
). He listens to Castro's plans and signs on as a member of the July 26th Movement. There is a return to 1964 for Guevara's address before the United Nations General Assembly
, where he makes an impassioned speech against American imperialism
, and defends the executions his regime has committed, declaring "this is a battle to the death".
March 1957, Guevara deals with debilitating bouts of asthma as his group of revolutionaries meet up with Castro's group. Together, they attack an army barracks in the Sierra Maestra
on May 28, 1957. On October 15, 1958, the guerrillas approach the town of Las Villas. The Battle of Santa Clara
is depicted with Guevara demonstrating his tactical skill as the guerrillas engage in street-to-street fighting and derail a train carrying Cuban soldiers and armaments. Near the film's end, they are victorious. With the Cuban Revolution now over, Guevara heads to Havana
, remarking "we won the war, the revolution starts now".
hailing from Uruguay, who subsequently drives into the mountains to meet his men. The film is organized by the days that he was in the country. On Day 26, there is solidarity among Guevara's men despite his status as foreigner. By Day 67, Guevara has been set up for betrayal. He tries to recruit some peasants only to be mistaken for a cocaine
smuggler. On Day 100, there is a shortage of food and Guevara exercises discipline to resolve conflicts between his Cuban and Bolivian followers.
By Day 113, some of the guerrillas have deserted and the Bolivian army has discovered their base camp. Much to Che's disappointment Tamara "Tania" Bunke (Franka Potente
), Guevara's revolutionary contact, has botched elaborate preparations and given away their identity. On Day 141, the guerrillas capture some Bolivian soldiers that refuse to join the revolution and are free to return to their villages. CIA advisers arrive to supervise anti-insurgent activity and training. On Day 169, Guevara's visiting friend, the French intellectual Régis Debray
, is captured at Muyupampa by members of the Bolivian Army, which launch an aerial attack on Day 219.
Guevara grows sick and by Day 280 can barely breathe as a result of his acute asthma. On Day 302 Tania Bunke, Juan Acuña Ñunez, and several others in Che's forces are massacred by the Bolivian Army as they attempt to cross the Vado del Yeso. By Day 340, Guevara is trapped by the Bolivian army in the Yuro Ravine near the village of La Higuera
. Che is wounded and captured. The next day, a helicopter lands and a Cuban-American CIA agent Félix Rodríguez
emerges. The Bolivian high command are then phoned and give approval for Guevara's execution. He is shot on October 9, 1967, and his corpse lashed to the landing skids of a helicopter and flown out.
1997 biography Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. Actor Benicio del Toro and producer Laura Bickford optioned the film rights to Anderson's book. However, after two years they had not found a suitable writer and the rights expired. During this time Del Toro and Bickford researched the events depicted in Guerrilla with the idea of exploring Guevara's attempts to start a revolution in Bolivia. Del Toro has said that he previously only thought of Guevara as a "bad guy". For his role, Del Toro spent seven years "obsessively researching" Guevara's life, which made him feel like he "earned his stripes" to interpret the character. Preparation included looking at Guevara's photographs and reading his personal writings. Del Toro read Don Quixote, one of Guevara's favorites, and the first book published and given out free after the Cuban Revolution. Del Toro then personally met with people from different stages of Guevara's life, including Guevara's younger brother and childhood friends, traveling to Cuba
where Del Toro met Guevara's widow, family, and "tons of people that loved this man". The visit included a five-minute encounter at a book fair with Fidel Castro
, who expressed that he was happy for the "serious" research being undertaken. Such research included collaborating with the three surviving guerrillas from Guevara's ill-fated Bolivian campaign, and with several guerrillas who fought alongside him in Cuba. While researching for both films, Soderbergh made a documentary of his interviews with many of the people who had fought alongside Guevara. In his encounters with people ranging from fellow guerrillas to Guevara's driver, Del Toro described the reaction as "always the same", stating that he was "blown away" by the "bucketful of love" they still harbored for Guevara. In an interview, Del Toro described Guevara as "a weird combination of an intellectual and an action figure, Gregory Peck
and Steve McQueen
, wrapped in one". After the film's production concluded, Del Toro professed that "when you tell the story of Che, you're telling a story of the history of a country, so you have to be very careful".
had been in Bolivia as a journalist in 1966 working on a story about Che. Malick came on as director and worked on the screenplay with van der Veen and Del Toro, but after a year-and-a-half, the financing had not come together entirely and Malick left to make The New World, a film about Jamestown, Virginia
. Afraid that their multi-territory deals would fall apart, Bickford and Del Toro asked Steven Soderbergh, who was previously on board as producer, to direct. The filmmaker was drawn to the contrast of "engagement versus disengagement. Do we want to participate or observe? Once Che made the decision to engage, he engaged fully. Often people attribute that to a higher power, but as an atheist, he didn't have that. I found that very interesting". Furthermore, he remarked that Guevara was "great movie material" and "had one of the most fascinating lives" that he could "imagine in the last century". Bickford and Del Toro realized that there was no context for what made Guevara decide to go to Bolivia. They began looking for someone to rewrite the screenplay; Peter Buchman was recommended to them because he had a good reputation for writing about historical figures, based on a script he worked about Alexander the Great. He spent a year reading every available book on Guevara in preparation for writing the script. The project was put on hold when Bickford and Del Toro made Traffic
with Soderbergh.
Soderbergh wanted to incorporate Guevara's experiences in Cuba and at the United Nations
in 1964. Buchman helped with the structure of the script, which he gave three storylines: Guevara's life and the Cuban revolution; his demise in Bolivia; and his trip to New York to speak at the U.N. Buchman found that the problem with containing all of these stories in one film was that he had to condense time and this distorted history. Soderbergh found the draft Buchman submitted to him "unreadable" and after two weeks decided to split the script into two separate films. Buchman went back and with Del Toro expanded the Cuban story for The Argentine. Additional research included reading Guevara's diaries and declassified documents from the U.S. State Department
about his trip to New York and memos from the time he was in Bolivia.
Soderbergh found the task of researching such a popular historical figure as Guevara a daunting one: "If you go to any bookstore, you'll find an entire wall of Che-related material. We tried to go through all of it, we were overwhelmed with information. He means something different to everyone. At a certain point we had to decide for ourselves who Che was". The original source material for these scripts was Guevara's diary from the Cuban revolution, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, and from his time in Bolivia, Bolivian Diary. From there, he drew on interviews with people who knew Guevara from both of those time periods and read every book available that pertained to both Cuba and Bolivia. Bickford and Del Toro met with Harry "Pombo" Villegas, Urbano and Benigno—three men who met Guevara during the Cuban revolution, followed him to Bolivia, and survived. They interviewed them individually and then Pombo and Benigno together about their experiences in Cuba and Bolivia. Urbano was an adviser while they were filming in Spain and the actors often consulted with him and the others about specific details, like how to hold their guns in a certain situation, and very specific tactical information.
In December 2008, Ocean Press, in cooperation with the Che Guevara Publishing Project, released Che: The Diaries of Ernesto Che Guevara, with a movie tie-in cover. The book's aim was to compile all the original letters, diary excerpts, speeches and maps on which Soderbergh relied for the film. The text is interspersed with remarks by Benicio del Toro and Steven Soderbergh.
passed on this one too". Foreign pre-sales covered $54 million of the $58 million budget. Wild Bunch
, a French production, distribution and foreign sales company put up 75% of the budget for the two films, tapping into a production and acquisition fund from financing and investment company Continental Entertainment Capitol, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Citigroup
. Spain's Telecinco/Moreno Films supplied the rest of the budget.
underwent major renovations, Del Toro and Soderbergh shot the scenes of Guevara speaking to the United Nations General Assembly
in 1964. The director wanted to shoot the first part of The Argentine in Cuba, but was prevented from travelling there by the United States government
's embargo. Doubling Santa Clara proved to be difficult because it was a certain size and had a certain look. Soderbergh spent four to five months scouting for a suitable replacement, looking at towns in Veracruz/Yucatán before settling on Campeche
, which had the elements they needed.
The original intention was for The Argentine to be shot using anamorphic
16 mm film
because, according to the director, it needed "a bit of Bruckheimer
but scruffier". He kept to his plan of shooting the first film "The Argentine" anamorphically, and the second film "Guerrilla" with spherical lenses. Soderbergh wanted to use the new RED One rather than 16 mm film because of its ability replicate film stock digitally but initially it was not going to be available on time. However, their Spanish work papers and visas
were late and Del Toro and Soderbergh were grounded in Los Angeles for a week. The director was meanwhile informed that the prototype cameras were ready.
The film is a tribute to the Marxist notion of advancement through two conflicting ideas, known as dialectics, with its division into halves, with two tempos, two color schemes, two aspect ratios and two approaches to chronology. Each half focuses on a different revolution, both fundamentally the same in theory but vastly different in outcome. Soderbergh wanted the two parts of the film to mimic the voice of the two diaries they were based on; the Cuban diaries were written after the fact and, according to the director, "with a certain hindsight and perspective and a tone that comes from being victorious", while the Bolivia diaries were "contemporaneous, and they're very isolated and have no perspective, at all. It's a much more tense read, because the outcome is totally unclear".
Soderbergh shot the films back-to-back in the beginning of July 2007 with Guerrilla shot first in Spain for 39 days and The Argentine shot in Puerto Rico
and Mexico for 39 days. The director conceived The Argentine as "a Hollywood movie" shot in widescreen 'scope aspect ratio, with the camera either fixed or moving on a dolly or a Steadicam
. Guerrilla was shot, according to Soderbergh, "in Super-16, 1.85:1. No dollies, no cranes
, it's all either handheld
or tripods
. I want it to look nice but simple. We'll work with a very small group: basically me, the producer Gregory Jacobs and the unit production manager". According to the director, the portion set in Cuba was written from the perspective of the victor and as a result he adopted a more traditional look with classical compositions, vibrant color and a warm palette. With Guerrilla, he wanted a sense of foreboding with hand-held camerawork and a muted color palette. Soderbergh told his production design Antxon Gomez that the first part would have green with a lot of yellow in it and the second part would have green with a lot of blue in it.
At the end of The Argentine, Soderbergh depicts Guevara's derailing of a freight train during the Battle of Santa Clara
. In filming the sequence, Soderbergh balked at the digital effects solution and managed to reallocate $500,000 from the overall $58 million budget to build a real set of tracks and a train powered by two V-8 car engines. To film the scene, they had six rehearsals, and could only shoot the scene once.
Many aspects of Guevara's personality and beliefs affected the filming process. For instance, close-ups of Del Toro were avoided due to Guevara's belief in collectivism
, with Soderbergh remarking, "You can't make a movie about a guy who has these hard-core sort of egalitarian
socialist
principles and then isolate him with close-ups." According to Edgar Ramirez
, who portrays Ciro Redondo, the cast "were improvising a lot" while making The Argentine, and he describes the project as a "very contemplative movie", shot chronologically. While filming outdoors, Soderbergh used natural light as much as possible. Del Toro, who speaks Puerto Rican Spanish
, tried to speak the best Argentinean Spanish (Rioplatense Spanish
) he could without sounding "stiff". Prior to shooting the final scenes of the film that depict Guevara's time in Bolivia at the end of his life, Del Toro shed 35 pounds to show how ill Guevara had become. The actor shaved the top of his head rather than wear a bald cap for the scenes depicting Guevara's arrival in Bolivia in disguise.
Soderbergh has said that with Che, he wanted to show every day tasks, "things that have meaning on a practical level and on an ideological level", as a "way of showing what it might have been like to be there". While addressing the issue after at the Toronto International Film Festival, Soderbergh remarked that he was trying to avoid what he felt were typical scenes for a biographical film and that he would tell screenwriter Peter Buchman, that he was "trying to find the scenes that would happen before or after the scene that you would typically see in a movie like this". Soderbergh was not interested in depicted Guevara's personal life because he felt that "everybody on these campaigns has a personal life, they all left families behind, that doesn't make him special and why should I go into his personal life and nobody else's?"
Soderbergh decided to omit the post-revolution
execution sentences of "suspected war criminals, traitors and informants" that Guevara reviewed at La Cabana Fortress because "there is no amount of accumulated barbarity that would have satisfied the people who hate him". Soderbergh addressed the criticism for this omission in a post release interview where he stated: "I don't think anybody now, even in Cuba, is going to sit with a straight face and defend the events. La Cabana was really turned into a Roman circus, where I think even the people in power look back on that as excessive. However, every regime, in order to retain power when it feels threatened, acts excessively ... This is what people do when they feel they need to act in an extreme way to secure themselves". The filmmaker noted as well that, "with a character this complicated, you’re going to have a very polarized reaction". Furthermore, he was not interested in depicting Guevara's life as "a bureaucrat", stating that he was making a diptych
about two military campaigns, declaring the pictures "war films". Soderbergh said, "I'm sure some people will say, 'That's convenient because that's when he was at his worst.' Yeah, maybe — it just wasn't interesting to me. I was interested in making a procedural about guerrilla warfare".
Soderbergh described the Cuban revolution as "the last analog revolution. I loved that we shot a period film about a type of war that can't be fought anymore". Soderbergh has said that he is open to making another film about Guevara's experiences in the Congo but only if Che makes $100 million at the box office.
paid a low seven-figure sum to acquire all North American rights to Che after production had completed and released it on December 12, 2008 in New York City and Los Angeles in order to qualify for the Academy Awards. The "special roadshow edition" in Los Angeles and New York City was initially planned as a one-week special engagement—complete with intermission and including a full-color printed program—but strong box-office results led to its re-opening for two weeks on January 9, 2009 as two separate films, titled Che Part 1: The Argentine and Che Part 2: Guerrilla. Soderbergh said that the inspiration for the program came from the 70 mm engagements for Francis Ford Coppola
's Apocalypse Now
. The film was expanded to additional markets on January 16 and 22 both as a single film and as two separate films. IFC made the films available through video on demand
on January 21 on all major cable and satellite providers in both standard and high definition versions.
reportedly running over four hours. After this screening, Soderbergh cut five to seven minutes from each half of the film. It was shown at the 46th New York Film Festival
and was shown at the 33rd Toronto Film Festival as Che with a 15-minute intermission and as two separate films, The Argentine and Guerrilla, where it was considered the "must-see" film of the festival. Che made its sold-out Los Angeles premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre
on November 1, 2008 as part of the AFI
Fest.
Che was screened in Guevara's homeland of Argentina
in November 2008. To mark the occasion, the streets of Buenos Aires
were decorated with large posters of Del Toro in his role as the guerrilla fighter, unprecedented in the city's history. When questioned by the press on Guevara's ideas and use of violence, Del Toro stated that if he had lived during the 1960s he would have agreed with Guevara, and that although he did not support violent revolution now, in the sixties he may "have been another person and in agreement with armed war".
Del Toro and Soderbergh both attended the French premiere in late November 2008, where they took questions from the press. Del Toro remarked that the "legendary rebel" was still pertinent because "the things that he fought for in the late 1950s and mid 1960s are still relevant today", adding that "he did not hide behind curtains ... he stood up for the forgotten ones". When asked why he made the film, Soderbergh stated, "I needed to make the film, and that is a different feeling. I felt like, if I am worth anything, I have to say yes. I can't say no". The following day, the Dubai International Film Festival
would describe Soderbergh's narrative as a "magisterial ... compelling experience", with Del Toro's performance as "blue-chip".
Che opened in single theaters in New York and Los Angeles where it made $60,100 with sellouts of both venues. Based on this success, IFC Films executives added two weekends of exclusive runs for the roadshow version, starting December 24 in New York and December 26 in Los Angeles. This successful run prompted IFC Films to show this version in nine additional markets on January 16. Che will be shown in its entirety, commercial and trailer free with an intermission and limited edition program book at every screening. Soderbergh has said that the roadshow version of the film will not be released on DVD but released in two parts with the animated map that opens the roadshow's second half missing from part II, as well as the overture and intermission music.
According to Variety, it had grossed $164,142 in one weekend, at 35 locations in North America and $20 million from a half-dozen major markets around the world, led by Spain at $9.7 million. As of May 2009, it has grossed $1.4 million in North America and $29.8 million in the rest of the world for a worldwide total of $30 million. Eventually, Che made good profit for IFC Films
.
Todd McCarthy was more mixed in his reaction to the film in its present form, describing it as "too big a roll of the dice to pass off as an experiment, as it's got to meet high standards both commercially and artistically. The demanding running time forces comparison to such rare works as Lawrence of Arabia
, Reds and other biohistorical epics. Unfortunately, Che doesn’t feel epic — just long". Anne Thompson wrote that Benicio del Toro "gives a great performance", but predicted that "it will not be released as it was seen here". Glenn Kenny wrote, "Che benefits greatly from certain Soderberghian qualities that don't always serve his other films well, e.g., detachment, formalism, and intellectual curiosity".
Peter Bradshaw, in his review for The Guardian
, wrote, "Perhaps it will even come to be seen as this director's flawed masterpiece: enthralling but structurally fractured - the second half is much clearer and more sure-footed than the first — and at times frustratingly reticent, unwilling to attempt any insight into Che's interior world". In his less favorable review for Esquire
, Stephen Garrett criticized the film for failing to show Guevara's negative aspects, "the absence of darker, more contradictory revelations of his nature leaves Che bereft of complexity. All that remains is a South American superman: uncomplex, pure of heart, defiantly pious and boring". Richard Corliss
had problems with Del Toro's portrayal of Guevara: "Del Toro — whose acting style often starts over the top and soars from there, like a hang-glider leaping from a skyscraper roof — is muted, yielding few emotional revelations, seemingly sedated here ... Che is defined less by his rigorous fighting skills and seductive intellect than by his asthma". In his review for Salon.com, Andrew O'Hehir praised Soderbergh for making "something that people will be eager to see and eager to talk about all over the world, something that feels strangely urgent, something messy and unfinished and amazing. I'd be surprised if Che doesn't win the Palme d'Or ... but be that as it may, nobody who saw it here will ever forget it".
Soderbergh replied to the criticism that he made an unconventional film: "I find it hilarious that most of the stuff being written about movies is how conventional they are, and then you have people ... upset that something's not conventional. The bottom line is we're just trying to give you a sense of what it was like to hang out around this person. That's really it. And the scenes were chosen strictly on the basis of, 'Yeah, what does that tell us about his character?'".
After Cannes, Soderbergh made a few minor adjustments to the film. This included adding a moment of Guevara and Fidel Castro shaking hands, tweaking a few transitions, and tacking on an overture and entr’acte to the "road show" version that will play in major cities. Moreover, he removed the trial of guerrilla Lalo Sardiñas, which Chicago film critic Ben Kenigsberg found "regrettable", stating that it was "not only one of the film's most haunting scenes but a key hint at the darker side of Che's ideology".
, based on a screening at the New York Film Festival
, Manohla Dargis
observes that "throughout the movie Mr. Soderbergh mixes the wild beauty of his landscapes with images of Che heroically engaged in battle, thoughtfully scribbling and reading, and tending to ailing peasants and soldiers". According to Dargis, "Che wins, Che loses, but Che remains the same in what plays like a procedural about a charismatic leader, impossible missions and the pleasures of work and camaraderie", referring to the "historical epic" as "Ocean's Eleven
with better cigars". However, Dargis notes that "Mr. Soderbergh cagily evades Che's ugly side, notably his increasing commitment to violence and seemingly endless war, but the movie is without question political — even if it emphasizes romantic adventure over realpolitik — because, like all films, it is predicated on getting, spending and making money".
Film critic Glenn Kenny wrote, "Che seems to me almost the polar opposite of agitprop. It flat out does not ask for the kind of emotional engagement that more conventional epic biopics do, and that's a good thing". In his review for UGO, Keith Uhlich wrote, "The best to say about Del Toro's Cannes-honored performance is that it's exhausting — all exterior, no soul, like watching an android run a gauntlet (one that includes grueling physical exertions, tendentious political speechifying, and risible Matt Damon
cameos)". Slant magazine gave Che two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "The problem is that, despite his desire to sidestep Hollywood bio-hooey, the director is unable to turn his chilly stance into an ideological perspective, like Roberto Rossellini
did in his demythologized portraits of Louis XIV, Garibaldi and Pascal
".
In his review for Salon magazine, Andrew O'Hehir wrote, "What Soderbergh has sought to capture here is a grand process of birth and extinguishment, one that produced a complicated legacy in which John McCain
, Barack Obama
and Raúl Castro are still enmeshed. There will be plenty of time to argue about the film's (or films') political relevance or lack thereof, to call Soderbergh names for this or that historical omission, for this or that ideological error. He's made something that people will be eager to see and eager to talk about all over the world, something that feels strangely urgent, something messy and unfinished and amazing".
Festival. Taking place only a few miles from Little Havana, which is home to the largest Cuban-American community in the United States, the invitation-only screening was met with angry demonstrators. The organization Vigilia Mambisa, led by Miguel Saavedra, amassed an estimated 100 demonstrators to decry what they believed would be a favorable depiction of Guevara. Saavedra told reporters from the El Nuevo Herald
that "you can not offend the sensitivities of the people", while describing the film as "a disgrace". A supporter of the demonstration, Miami Beach's mayor Matti Herrera Bower
, lamented that the film was shown, while declaring "we must not allow dissemination of this movie". When asked days later about the incident, Del Toro remarked that the ability to speak out was "part of what makes America great" while adding "I find it a little weird that they were protesting without having seen the film, but that's another matter". For his part, Soderbergh later stated that "you have to separate the Cuban nationalist lobby that is centered in Miami from the rest of the country".
as part of the Latin American Film Festival. Benicio Del Toro, who was in attendance, referred to the film as "Cuban history", while remarking that "there's an audience in there ... that could be the most knowledgeable critics of the historical accuracy of the film". The official state paper Granma
gave Del Toro a glowing review, professing that he "personifies Che" in both his physical appearance and his "masterly interpretation". After unveiling Che in Havana's Yara Cinema, Del Toro was treated to a 10-minute standing ovation from the 2,000+ strong audience, many of whom were involved in the revolution.
, himself an avowed socialist and admirer of Che Guevara, greeted Del Toro and co star Bichir at the Presidential Palace in Caracas
. The day prior Del Toro attended a screening of the film at a bull-fighting ring-turned cultural center, where he was "mobbed by adoring fans". Del Toro then visited the state-run Cinema Town, a film production facility President Chávez launched to help Venezuela produce its own movies as an alternative to what Chávez calls Hollywood's
"cultural imperialism
." Del Toro described Che as "a totally Latin American movie" and stated that he had "a good meeting with the President".
, while Che: Part 2 has a 76% rating. Scott Foundas of the LA Weekly
proclaimed Che "nothing if not the movie of the year". In his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman
wrote, "At its best, Che is both action film and ongoing argument. Each new camera setup seeks to introduce a specific idea—about Che or his situation—and every choreographed battle sequence is a sort of algorithm where the camera attempts to inscribe the event that is being enacted". Hoberman compared Soderbergh's directing style and "non-personalized" historical approach on the film to Otto Preminger
's observational use of the moving camera, or one of Roberto Rossellini
's "serene" documentaries. Armond White
, in his review for the New York Press
, wrote, "Out-perversing Gus Van Sant
's Milk
, Soderbergh makes a four-hour-plus biopic about a historical figure without providing a glimmer of charm or narrative coherence". In his review for The New York Times
, A.O. Scott writes, "Mr. Soderbergh once again offers a master class in filmmaking. As history, though, Che is finally not epic but romance. It takes great care to be true to the factual record, but it is, nonetheless, a fairy tale". Sheri Linden, in her review for the Los Angeles Times
, wrote, "in this flawed work of austere beauty, the logistics of war and the language of revolution give way to something greater, a struggle that may be defined by politics but can't be contained by it". In her review for the Washington Post, Ann Hornaday wrote, "The best way to encounter Che, is to let go of words like 'film' and 'movie', words that somehow seem inadequate to the task of describing such a mesmerizing, fully immersive cinematic experience. By the end of Che, viewers will likely emerge as if from a trance, with indelibly vivid, if not more ambivalent feelings about Guevara, than the bumper-sticker image they walked in with".
Entertainment Weekly
gave a "B+" rating to the first half of the film and a "C-" rating to the second half, and Owen Gleiberman
wrote, "As political theater, Che moves from faith to impotence, which is certainly a valid reading of Communism in the 20th century. Yet as drama, that makes the second half of the film borderline deadly ... Che is twice as long as it needs to be, but it is also only half the movie it should have been". James Verniere of The Boston Herald gave the film a B-, describing the work as a new genre of "arthouse guerrilla nostalgia", while lamenting Che as the film version of Alberto Korda
’s iconic 1960 photograph Guerrillero Heroico
. In Verniere's view, so much information was missing, that he recommended one first see The Motorcycle Diaries
to fill in the background. In her review for USA Today
, Claudia Puig wrote, "With its lyrical beauty and strong performances, the film can be riveting. Its excessive length and rambling scenes also make it maddening. It is worth seeing for its attention to visual detail and ambitious filmmaking, but as a psychological portrait of a compelling historical figure, it is oddly bland and unrevealing". Anthony Lane
, in his review for The New Yorker
, wrote, "for all the movie’s narrative momentum, Che retains the air of a study exercise—of an interest brilliantly explored. How else to explain one’s total flatness of feeling at the climax of each movie?" Taking a more positive stance, film critic Chris Barsanti compared Che to a "guerrilla take on Patton
", calling it "an exceptionally good" war film, which rivaled The Battle of Algiers in its "you-are-there sensibility". Roger Ebert
awarded the film 3.5 our of 4 stars and addressed the film's length: "You may wonder if the film is too long. I think there's a good reason for its length. Guevara's experience in Cuba and especially Bolivia was not a series of events and anecdotes, but a trial of endurance that might almost be called mad".
Film Comment
ranked Che as the 22nd best film of 2008 in their "Best Films of 2008" poll.
Film critics Roger Ebert, and James Rocchi
went further, naming Che one of the best films of 2008. The film appeared on several critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2008.
Looking back at the experience of making Che, Soderbergh has said that he now wishes that he had not made the film and remarked, "Literally I'd wake up and think, 'At least I'm not doing that today.'" The director blamed piracy for the film's financial failure and felt that "It's a film that, to some extent, needs the support of people who write about films. If you'd had all these guys running around talking in accented English you'd [have got] your head taken off".
(or Best Actor Award) at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance in Che and in his acceptance speech dedicated his award "to the man himself, Che Guevara and I want to share this with Steven Soderbergh. He was there pushing it even when there [were lulls] and pushing all of us". Guevara's widow Aleida March, who is president of the Che Guevara Studies Center, sent a congratulatory note to Del Toro upon hearing the news of his award. Del Toro was awarded a 2009 Goya Award as the best Spanish Lead Actor
for his depiction of Che. Actor Sean Penn
, who won an Oscar
for his role in Milk
, remarked that he was surprised and disappointed that Che and Del Toro were not also up for any Academy Award nominations. During his acceptance speech for the Best Actor's trophy at the Screen Actors Guild Awards
Penn expressed his dismay stating, "The fact that there aren't crowns on Soderbergh's and Del Toro's heads right now, I don't understand ... that is such a sensational movie, Che." In reference to what Penn deemed a snub, he added "Maybe because it's in Spanish
, maybe the length, maybe the politics".
On July 31, 2009, Del Toro was awarded the inaugural Tomas Gutierrez Alea
prize at a Havana ceremony attended by U.S. actors Robert Duvall
, James Caan and Bill Murray
. Named after a prolific Cuban filmmaker, the new award was voted for by the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba
. Del Toro remarked that it was "an honor" to receive the award and thanked Che director Steven Soderbergh.
Che was also awarded "The White Camel", the top award handed out at the sixth annual International Sahara Film Festival
, whose ceremony took place during the spring of 2009 in
Dakhla
, Western Sahara
at a Sahrawi refugee camp of 30,000 residents. Executive producer Alvaro Longoria, attended to accept the award when Del Toro couldn't because of filming for The Wolf Man. After dismounting the prize (which was a literal camel
) Longoria remarked that "this is real, this is what Benicio and Steven tried to tell in the movie. It’s right here, a people fighting a war for their dignity and their land. The principles of Che Guevara
are very important to them." However, Longoria gave back the live animal before departing, opting for a camel statuette in its place.
in January 2009 exclusively from Blockbuster for 60 days as per an agreement with IFC. The Criterion Collection was originally scheduled to release the film on Region 1 Blu-ray Disc
in December 2009. However, the release date was re-scheduled to January 19, 2010. The two-disc Blu-ray release features 1080p video and a Spanish DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack (with English subtitles).
Supplements include:
Multimedia
Biographical film
A biographical film, or biopic , is a film that dramatizes the life of an actual person or people. They differ from films “based on a true story” or “historical films” in that they attempt to comprehensively tell a person’s life story or at least the most historically important years of their...
about Ernesto 'Che' Guevara
Che Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...
directed by Steven Soderbergh
Steven Soderbergh
Steven Andrew Soderbergh is an American film producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, and an Academy Award-winning film director. He is best known for directing commercial Hollywood films like Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and the remake of Ocean's Eleven, but he has also directed smaller less...
and starring Benicio del Toro
Benicio del Toro
Benicio Monserrate Rafael del Toro Sánchez is a Puerto Rican and Spanish actor and film producer. He won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a BAFTA Award for his role as Javier Rodríguez in Traffic . He is also known for his roles as Fred Fenster in The Usual...
. Rather than follow a standard chronological order, the films offer an oblique series of interspersed moments along the overall timeline. Part One is entitled The Argentine and focuses on the Cuban revolution
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
from the landing of Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...
, Guevara, and other revolutionaries on Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
to their successful toppling of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista
Fulgencio Batista
Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar was the United States-aligned Cuban President, dictator and military leader who served as the leader of Cuba from 1933 to 1944 and from 1952 to 1959, before being overthrown as a result of the Cuban Revolution....
two years later. Part Two is entitled Guerrilla and focuses on Guevara's attempt to bring revolution to Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...
and his demise. Both parts are shot in a cinéma vérité
Cinéma vérité
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking, combining naturalistic techniques with stylized cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects. It is also known for taking a provocative stance toward its topics.There are subtle yet...
style, but each has different approaches to linear
Linear
In mathematics, a linear map or function f is a function which satisfies the following two properties:* Additivity : f = f + f...
narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...
, camerawork
Cinematography
Cinematography is the making of lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for cinema. It is closely related to the art of still photography...
, and the visual look.
Filmmaker Terrence Malick
Terrence Malick
Terrence Frederick Malick is a U.S. film director, screenwriter, and producer. In a career spanning almost four decades, Malick has directed five feature films....
originally worked on a screenplay limited to Guevara's attempts to start a revolution in Bolivia. When financing fell through, Malick left the project, and subsequently Soderbergh agreed to direct the film. He realized that there was no context for Guevara's actions in Bolivia and decided that his participation in the Cuban revolution and his appearance at the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
in 1964 should also be depicted. Peter Buchman was hired to write the screenplay: the script was so long that Soderbergh decided to divide the film into two parts, one chronicling Cuba and other depicting Bolivia. Soderbergh shot the films back-to-back starting at the beginning of July 2007, with Guerrilla first in Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
for 39 days, and The Argentine shot in Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...
and Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
for 39 days.
Che was screened as a single film at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival
Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...
. Del Toro won the Best Actor Award
Best Actor Award (Cannes Film Festival)
The Best Actor Award is an award presented at the Cannes Film Festival. It is chosen by the jury from the 'official section' of movies at the festival. It was first awarded in 1946.- Award Winners :-External links:* * ....
, and the film received mostly positive reviews. IFC Films
IFC Films
IFC Films is an American film distribution company based in New York, owned by AMC Networks. It distributes independent films and documentaries under the IFC Films, Sundance Selects and IFC Midnight. It operates the IFC Center....
, which holds all North American rights to Che, initially released the combined film for one week on December 12, 2008 in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
and Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
to qualify for the year's Academy Awards
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...
. Strong box office performance led to the "special roadshow edition"
Roadshow theatrical release
A roadshow theatrical release was a term in the American motion picture industry for a practice in which a film opened in a limited number of theaters in large cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, and San Francisco for a specific period of time before the...
being extended in New York and Los Angeles and later expanded into additional markets. The film was released as two separate films, titled Che Part 1: The Argentine and Che Part 2: Guerrilla, and distribution expanded further after that. The Independent Film Channel
Independent Film Channel
The Independent Film Channel is an American cable TV network that airs independent film and related programming. IFC programming includes commercially interrupted feature-length films, original documentaries, shorts, animated series, original series, acquired series, and content exclusively for...
released the films via video on demand
Video on demand
Video on Demand or Audio and Video On Demand are systems which allow users to select and watch/listen to video or audio content on demand...
and on Region 1 DVD exclusively from Blockbuster. As of October 2009, Che parts I and II had grossed US$40,779,241 worldwide.
Part 1: The Argentine
In Havana 1964, Che Guevara (Benicio del ToroBenicio del Toro
Benicio Monserrate Rafael del Toro Sánchez is a Puerto Rican and Spanish actor and film producer. He won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a BAFTA Award for his role as Javier Rodríguez in Traffic . He is also known for his roles as Fred Fenster in The Usual...
) is interviewed by Lisa Howard
Lisa Howard (reporter)
Lisa Howard was a pioneering female journalist and television news anchor who also had a career as an off-Broadway theater and TV soap opera actress....
(Julia Ormond
Julia Ormond
Julia Karin Ormond is an English actress who has appeared in film and television and on stage.-Early life and education:...
) who asks him if reform throughout Latin America might not blunt the "message of the Cuban Revolution". In 1955, at a gathering in Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
, Guevara first meets Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...
(Demian Bichir
Demián Bichir
Demián Bichir Nájera is a Mexican actor. Both of his parents, Alejandro Bichir and Maricruz Nájera, and brothers Odiseo and Bruno Bichir are actors. He was married to singer Lisset Gutiérrez.-Career:...
). He listens to Castro's plans and signs on as a member of the July 26th Movement. There is a return to 1964 for Guevara's address before the United Nations General Assembly
United Nations General Assembly
For two articles dealing with membership in the General Assembly, see:* General Assembly members* General Assembly observersThe United Nations General Assembly is one of the five principal organs of the United Nations and the only one in which all member nations have equal representation...
, where he makes an impassioned speech against American imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
, and defends the executions his regime has committed, declaring "this is a battle to the death".
March 1957, Guevara deals with debilitating bouts of asthma as his group of revolutionaries meet up with Castro's group. Together, they attack an army barracks in the Sierra Maestra
Sierra Maestra
Sierra Maestra is a mountain range that runs westward across the south of the old Oriente Province from what is now Guantánamo Province to Niquero in southeast Cuba, rising abruptly from the coast. Some view it as a series of connecting ranges , which joins with others extending to the west...
on May 28, 1957. On October 15, 1958, the guerrillas approach the town of Las Villas. The Battle of Santa Clara
Battle of Santa Clara
The Battle of Santa Clara was a series of events in late December 1958 that led to the capture of the Cuban city of Santa Clara by revolutionaries under the command of Che Guevara...
is depicted with Guevara demonstrating his tactical skill as the guerrillas engage in street-to-street fighting and derail a train carrying Cuban soldiers and armaments. Near the film's end, they are victorious. With the Cuban Revolution now over, Guevara heads to Havana
Havana
Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...
, remarking "we won the war, the revolution starts now".
Part 2: Guerrilla
The second part begins with Guevara arriving in Bolivia disguised as a middle-aged representative of the Organization of American StatesOrganization of American States
The Organization of American States is a regional international organization, headquartered in Washington, D.C., United States...
hailing from Uruguay, who subsequently drives into the mountains to meet his men. The film is organized by the days that he was in the country. On Day 26, there is solidarity among Guevara's men despite his status as foreigner. By Day 67, Guevara has been set up for betrayal. He tries to recruit some peasants only to be mistaken for a cocaine
Cocaine
Cocaine is a crystalline tropane alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant. The name comes from "coca" in addition to the alkaloid suffix -ine, forming cocaine. It is a stimulant of the central nervous system, an appetite suppressant, and a topical anesthetic...
smuggler. On Day 100, there is a shortage of food and Guevara exercises discipline to resolve conflicts between his Cuban and Bolivian followers.
By Day 113, some of the guerrillas have deserted and the Bolivian army has discovered their base camp. Much to Che's disappointment Tamara "Tania" Bunke (Franka Potente
Franka Potente
Franka Potente is a German film actress and singer. She first appeared in the comedy After Five in the Forest Primeval and gained critical recognition in the action thriller Lola rennt . Potente received Germany's highest film and television awards for her performances in Run Lola Run and...
), Guevara's revolutionary contact, has botched elaborate preparations and given away their identity. On Day 141, the guerrillas capture some Bolivian soldiers that refuse to join the revolution and are free to return to their villages. CIA advisers arrive to supervise anti-insurgent activity and training. On Day 169, Guevara's visiting friend, the French intellectual Régis Debray
Régis Debray
Jules Régis Debray is a French intellectual, journalist, government official and professor. He is known for his theorization of mediology, a critical theory of the long-term transmission of cultural meaning in human society; and for having fought in 1967 with Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in...
, is captured at Muyupampa by members of the Bolivian Army, which launch an aerial attack on Day 219.
Guevara grows sick and by Day 280 can barely breathe as a result of his acute asthma. On Day 302 Tania Bunke, Juan Acuña Ñunez, and several others in Che's forces are massacred by the Bolivian Army as they attempt to cross the Vado del Yeso. By Day 340, Guevara is trapped by the Bolivian army in the Yuro Ravine near the village of La Higuera
La Higuera
La Higuera is a small village in Bolivia located in the Province of Vallegrande, in the Department of Santa Cruz. It is situated in the La Higuera Canton belonging to the Pucará municipality.-Geography:...
. Che is wounded and captured. The next day, a helicopter lands and a Cuban-American CIA agent Félix Rodríguez
Félix Rodríguez (Central Intelligence Agency)
Félix Ismael Rodríguez Mendigutia is a former Central Intelligence Agency officer infamous for his involvement in the Bay of Pigs Invasion, in the interrogation and execution of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara and his ties to George H. W. Bush during the Iran-Contra Affair...
emerges. The Bolivian high command are then phoned and give approval for Guevara's execution. He is shot on October 9, 1967, and his corpse lashed to the landing skids of a helicopter and flown out.
Cast
- Benicio del ToroBenicio del ToroBenicio Monserrate Rafael del Toro Sánchez is a Puerto Rican and Spanish actor and film producer. He won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a BAFTA Award for his role as Javier Rodríguez in Traffic . He is also known for his roles as Fred Fenster in The Usual...
as Ernesto "Che" GuevaraChe GuevaraErnesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist... - Franka PotenteFranka PotenteFranka Potente is a German film actress and singer. She first appeared in the comedy After Five in the Forest Primeval and gained critical recognition in the action thriller Lola rennt . Potente received Germany's highest film and television awards for her performances in Run Lola Run and...
as Tamara "Tania" Bunke - Catalina Sandino MorenoCatalina Sandino MorenoCatalina Sandino Moreno is a Colombian actress. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Maria Full of Grace .-Life and career:...
as Aleida MarchAleida MarchAleida March is Ernesto "Che" Guevara's second wife, and a member of Castro's Cuban army. Her marriage with Che Guevara is reported to have happened both on 23 March 1959 and 2 June 1959. A civil ceremony was held at La Cabana Military fortress... - Julia OrmondJulia OrmondJulia Karin Ormond is an English actress who has appeared in film and television and on stage.-Early life and education:...
as Lisa HowardLisa Howard (reporter)Lisa Howard was a pioneering female journalist and television news anchor who also had a career as an off-Broadway theater and TV soap opera actress.... - Lou Diamond PhillipsLou Diamond PhillipsLou Diamond Phillips is an American film, television, and stage actor and director. His breakthrough came when he starred in the film La Bamba. He earned a supporting actor Golden Globe Award nomination for his role in Stand and Deliver and a Tony Award nomination for his role in The King and I...
as Mario MonjeMario MonjeMario Monje Molina was the Secretary-General of the PCB, the Communist Party of Bolivia . When the party split into a pro-Soviet and a pro-Beijing wing, he became the leader of the pro-Soviet wing... - Benjamín BenítezBenjamín BenítezBenjamin Benitez is an Mexican-American actor, who played Gardez on the TV Series, Tru Calling.-External links:...
as Harry "Pombo" Villegas - Armando RiescoArmando RiescoArmando Riesco is a Puerto Rican film and television actor and voice artist.-Biography:Riesco was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico to Cuban immigrants who resettled there. He was raised in San Juan where he attended Colegio San Ignacio de Loyola. Riesco then attended Northwestern University...
as Benigno - Demian BichirDemián BichirDemián Bichir Nájera is a Mexican actor. Both of his parents, Alejandro Bichir and Maricruz Nájera, and brothers Odiseo and Bruno Bichir are actors. He was married to singer Lisset Gutiérrez.-Career:...
as Fidel CastroFidel CastroFidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011... - Rodrigo SantoroRodrigo SantoroRodrigo Junqueira dos Reis Santoro is a Brazilian actor.-Life and career:Santoro was born in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro. He is of half Brazilian and half Italian descent. In 1993, as Santoro was studying Journalism at PUC-Rio, he entered the Actor's Workshop of Rede Globo...
as Raúl CastroRaúl CastroRaúl Modesto Castro Ruz is a Cuban politician and revolutionary who has been President of the Council of State of Cuba and the President of the Council of Ministers of Cuba since 2008; he previously exercised presidential powers in an acting capacity from 2006 to 2008... - Santiago CabreraSantiago CabreraSantiago Cabrera is a Chilean actor, most known for his role as the character Isaac Mendez in the television series Heroes and as Lancelot in the BBC drama series Merlin...
as Camilo CienfuegosCamilo CienfuegosCamilo Cienfuegos Gorriarán was a Cuban revolutionary born in Lawton, Havana. Raised in an anarchist family that had left Spain before the Spanish Civil War, he became a key figure of the Cuban Revolution, along with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Juan Almeida Bosque, and Raúl Castro.-Political... - Elvira Minguez as Celia SanchezCelia SánchezCelia Sánchez Manduley was a participant of the Cuban Revolution and a close friend, and rumored lover of Fidel Castro....
- Edgar RamirezEdgar RamirezÉdgar Filiberto Ramírez Arellano is a Venezuelan actor. He played Carlos in the 2010 French-German biopic series Carlos, a role for which he won the César Award for Most Promising Actor at the César Awards 2011. He also played "Paz", a CIA assassin in the movie The Bourne Ultimatum.Ramírez...
as Ciro Redondo - Alfredo De QuesadaAlfredo De QuesadaAlfredo De Quesada is a Puerto Rican film, television and theatre actor.Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico to Cuban immigrants who resettled in Puerto Rico, De Quesada was raised in San Juan where...
as Israel Pardo - Roberto Santana as Juan Almeida BosqueJuan Almeida BosqueJuan Almeida Bosque was a Cuban politician and one of the original commanders of the Cuban Revolution. After the 1959 revolution, he was a prominent figure in the Communist Party of Cuba; at the time of his death in 2009, he was a Vice-President of the Cuban Council of State and was its third...
- Victor RasukVictor RasukVictor Rasuk is an American actor.Rasuk was born in Harlem, New York to Dominican parents. He has one brother, Silvestre, with whom he starred in Raising Victor Vargas....
as Rogelio Acevedo - Kahlil Mendez as Urbano
- Matt DamonMatt DamonMatthew Paige "Matt" Damon is an American actor, screenwriter, and philanthropist whose career was launched following the success of the film Good Will Hunting , from a screenplay he co-wrote with friend Ben Affleck...
as Fr. Schwarz - Unax UgaldeUnax UgaldeUnax Ugalde Gutiérrez is a Spanish actor born in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Álava, in the Basque Country.-Biography:Unax Ugalde, son of a worker at the Altos Hornos and a housewife, was born in 1978 in Vitoria-Gasteiz. While, as a student, he ambitioned to become a marine scientist, started taking classes...
as Roberto "El Vaquerito" Rodríguez
Development
Originally, Che was intended to be a much more traditional film based on Jon Lee Anderson'sJon Lee Anderson
Jon Lee Anderson is a biographer, author, international investigative reporter, and staff writer for The New Yorker, reporting from warzone locales such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Uganda, Israel, El Salvador, Ireland, Lebanon, Iran, and throughout the Middle East. Anderson has also written for The New...
1997 biography Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. Actor Benicio del Toro and producer Laura Bickford optioned the film rights to Anderson's book. However, after two years they had not found a suitable writer and the rights expired. During this time Del Toro and Bickford researched the events depicted in Guerrilla with the idea of exploring Guevara's attempts to start a revolution in Bolivia. Del Toro has said that he previously only thought of Guevara as a "bad guy". For his role, Del Toro spent seven years "obsessively researching" Guevara's life, which made him feel like he "earned his stripes" to interpret the character. Preparation included looking at Guevara's photographs and reading his personal writings. Del Toro read Don Quixote, one of Guevara's favorites, and the first book published and given out free after the Cuban Revolution. Del Toro then personally met with people from different stages of Guevara's life, including Guevara's younger brother and childhood friends, traveling to Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
where Del Toro met Guevara's widow, family, and "tons of people that loved this man". The visit included a five-minute encounter at a book fair with Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...
, who expressed that he was happy for the "serious" research being undertaken. Such research included collaborating with the three surviving guerrillas from Guevara's ill-fated Bolivian campaign, and with several guerrillas who fought alongside him in Cuba. While researching for both films, Soderbergh made a documentary of his interviews with many of the people who had fought alongside Guevara. In his encounters with people ranging from fellow guerrillas to Guevara's driver, Del Toro described the reaction as "always the same", stating that he was "blown away" by the "bucketful of love" they still harbored for Guevara. In an interview, Del Toro described Guevara as "a weird combination of an intellectual and an action figure, Gregory Peck
Gregory Peck
Eldred Gregory Peck was an American actor.One of 20th Century Fox's most popular film stars from the 1940s to the 1960s, Peck continued to play important roles well into the 1980s. His notable performances include that of Atticus Finch in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird, for which he won an...
and Steve McQueen
Steve McQueen
Terrence Steven "Steve" McQueen was an American movie actor. He was nicknamed "The King of Cool." His "anti-hero" persona, which he developed at the height of the Vietnam counterculture, made him one of the top box-office draws of the 1960s and 1970s. McQueen received an Academy Award nomination...
, wrapped in one". After the film's production concluded, Del Toro professed that "when you tell the story of Che, you're telling a story of the history of a country, so you have to be very careful".
Screenplay
Del Toro and Bickford hired screenwriter Benjamin A. van der Veen to write the first drafts of the screenplay, and their extensive research took them to Cuba where they met with several of the remaining members of Guevara's team in Bolivia as well as the revolutionary's wife and children. It was during this phase of development that the filmmakers discovered Terrence MalickTerrence Malick
Terrence Frederick Malick is a U.S. film director, screenwriter, and producer. In a career spanning almost four decades, Malick has directed five feature films....
had been in Bolivia as a journalist in 1966 working on a story about Che. Malick came on as director and worked on the screenplay with van der Veen and Del Toro, but after a year-and-a-half, the financing had not come together entirely and Malick left to make The New World, a film about Jamestown, Virginia
Jamestown, Virginia
Jamestown was a settlement in the Colony of Virginia. Established by the Virginia Company of London as "James Fort" on May 14, 1607 , it was the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States, following several earlier failed attempts, including the Lost Colony of Roanoke...
. Afraid that their multi-territory deals would fall apart, Bickford and Del Toro asked Steven Soderbergh, who was previously on board as producer, to direct. The filmmaker was drawn to the contrast of "engagement versus disengagement. Do we want to participate or observe? Once Che made the decision to engage, he engaged fully. Often people attribute that to a higher power, but as an atheist, he didn't have that. I found that very interesting". Furthermore, he remarked that Guevara was "great movie material" and "had one of the most fascinating lives" that he could "imagine in the last century". Bickford and Del Toro realized that there was no context for what made Guevara decide to go to Bolivia. They began looking for someone to rewrite the screenplay; Peter Buchman was recommended to them because he had a good reputation for writing about historical figures, based on a script he worked about Alexander the Great. He spent a year reading every available book on Guevara in preparation for writing the script. The project was put on hold when Bickford and Del Toro made Traffic
Traffic (2000 film)
Traffic is a 2000 American crime drama film directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Stephen Gaghan. It explores the illegal drug trade from a number of perspectives: a user, an enforcer, a politician and a trafficker. Their stories are edited together throughout the film, although some of the...
with Soderbergh.
Soderbergh wanted to incorporate Guevara's experiences in Cuba and at the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
in 1964. Buchman helped with the structure of the script, which he gave three storylines: Guevara's life and the Cuban revolution; his demise in Bolivia; and his trip to New York to speak at the U.N. Buchman found that the problem with containing all of these stories in one film was that he had to condense time and this distorted history. Soderbergh found the draft Buchman submitted to him "unreadable" and after two weeks decided to split the script into two separate films. Buchman went back and with Del Toro expanded the Cuban story for The Argentine. Additional research included reading Guevara's diaries and declassified documents from the U.S. State Department
United States Department of State
The United States Department of State , is the United States federal executive department responsible for international relations of the United States, equivalent to the foreign ministries of other countries...
about his trip to New York and memos from the time he was in Bolivia.
Soderbergh found the task of researching such a popular historical figure as Guevara a daunting one: "If you go to any bookstore, you'll find an entire wall of Che-related material. We tried to go through all of it, we were overwhelmed with information. He means something different to everyone. At a certain point we had to decide for ourselves who Che was". The original source material for these scripts was Guevara's diary from the Cuban revolution, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, and from his time in Bolivia, Bolivian Diary. From there, he drew on interviews with people who knew Guevara from both of those time periods and read every book available that pertained to both Cuba and Bolivia. Bickford and Del Toro met with Harry "Pombo" Villegas, Urbano and Benigno—three men who met Guevara during the Cuban revolution, followed him to Bolivia, and survived. They interviewed them individually and then Pombo and Benigno together about their experiences in Cuba and Bolivia. Urbano was an adviser while they were filming in Spain and the actors often consulted with him and the others about specific details, like how to hold their guns in a certain situation, and very specific tactical information.
In December 2008, Ocean Press, in cooperation with the Che Guevara Publishing Project, released Che: The Diaries of Ernesto Che Guevara, with a movie tie-in cover. The book's aim was to compile all the original letters, diary excerpts, speeches and maps on which Soderbergh relied for the film. The text is interspersed with remarks by Benicio del Toro and Steven Soderbergh.
Financing
Initially, Che was going to be made in English and a strong interest in financing it was met; however, when the decision was made to make it in Spanish and break it up into two films, the studios' pay-TV deals, which were for English-language product only, "disappeared", according to Bickford, "and, at that point, nobody wanted to step up". The director defended his decision to shoot almost all of the film in Spanish in an interview: "You can't make a film with any level of credibility in this case unless it's in Spanish. I hope we're reaching a time where you go make a movie in another culture, that you shoot in the language of that culture. I'm hoping the days of that sort of specific brand of cultural imperialism have ended". Both films were financed without any American money or distribution deal; Soderbergh remarked, "It was very frustrating to know that this is a zeitgeist movie and that some of the very people who told me how much they now regret passing on TrafficTraffic (2000 film)
Traffic is a 2000 American crime drama film directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Stephen Gaghan. It explores the illegal drug trade from a number of perspectives: a user, an enforcer, a politician and a trafficker. Their stories are edited together throughout the film, although some of the...
passed on this one too". Foreign pre-sales covered $54 million of the $58 million budget. Wild Bunch
Wild Bunch (film company)
Wild Bunch S.A. is a French film production and international sales company. Originally a division of StudioCanal, the company has produced films such as Land of the Dead, Southland Tales and Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?. They have also produced Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream, Vicky...
, a French production, distribution and foreign sales company put up 75% of the budget for the two films, tapping into a production and acquisition fund from financing and investment company Continental Entertainment Capitol, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Citigroup
Citigroup
Citigroup Inc. or Citi is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States. Citigroup was formed from one of the world's largest mergers in history by combining the banking giant Citicorp and financial conglomerate...
. Spain's Telecinco/Moreno Films supplied the rest of the budget.
Principal photography
In 2006, shortly before the UN HeadquartersUnited Nations headquarters
The headquarters of the United Nations is a complex in New York City. The complex has served as the official headquarters of the United Nations since its completion in 1952. It is located in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, on spacious grounds overlooking the East River...
underwent major renovations, Del Toro and Soderbergh shot the scenes of Guevara speaking to the United Nations General Assembly
United Nations General Assembly
For two articles dealing with membership in the General Assembly, see:* General Assembly members* General Assembly observersThe United Nations General Assembly is one of the five principal organs of the United Nations and the only one in which all member nations have equal representation...
in 1964. The director wanted to shoot the first part of The Argentine in Cuba, but was prevented from travelling there by the United States government
Federal government of the United States
The federal government of the United States is the national government of the constitutional republic of fifty states that is the United States of America. The federal government comprises three distinct branches of government: a legislative, an executive and a judiciary. These branches and...
's embargo. Doubling Santa Clara proved to be difficult because it was a certain size and had a certain look. Soderbergh spent four to five months scouting for a suitable replacement, looking at towns in Veracruz/Yucatán before settling on Campeche
Campeche, Campeche
San Francisco de Campeche is the capital city of the Mexican state of Campeche, located at,...
, which had the elements they needed.
The original intention was for The Argentine to be shot using anamorphic
Anamorphic format
Anamorphic format is a term that can be used either for: the cinematography technique of capturing a widescreen picture on standard 35 mm film, or other visual recording media, with a non-widescreen native aspect ratio; or a photographic projection format in which the original image requires an...
16 mm film
16 mm film
16 mm film refers to a popular, economical gauge of film used for motion pictures and non-theatrical film making. 16 mm refers to the width of the film...
because, according to the director, it needed "a bit of Bruckheimer
Jerry Bruckheimer
Jerome Leon "Jerry" Bruckheimer is an American film and television producer. He has achieved great success in the genres of action, drama, and science fiction. His best known television series are CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, Eleventh Hour, Without a Trace, Cold Case, The...
but scruffier". He kept to his plan of shooting the first film "The Argentine" anamorphically, and the second film "Guerrilla" with spherical lenses. Soderbergh wanted to use the new RED One rather than 16 mm film because of its ability replicate film stock digitally but initially it was not going to be available on time. However, their Spanish work papers and visas
Visa (document)
A visa is a document showing that a person is authorized to enter the territory for which it was issued, subject to permission of an immigration official at the time of actual entry. The authorization may be a document, but more commonly it is a stamp endorsed in the applicant's passport...
were late and Del Toro and Soderbergh were grounded in Los Angeles for a week. The director was meanwhile informed that the prototype cameras were ready.
The film is a tribute to the Marxist notion of advancement through two conflicting ideas, known as dialectics, with its division into halves, with two tempos, two color schemes, two aspect ratios and two approaches to chronology. Each half focuses on a different revolution, both fundamentally the same in theory but vastly different in outcome. Soderbergh wanted the two parts of the film to mimic the voice of the two diaries they were based on; the Cuban diaries were written after the fact and, according to the director, "with a certain hindsight and perspective and a tone that comes from being victorious", while the Bolivia diaries were "contemporaneous, and they're very isolated and have no perspective, at all. It's a much more tense read, because the outcome is totally unclear".
Soderbergh shot the films back-to-back in the beginning of July 2007 with Guerrilla shot first in Spain for 39 days and The Argentine shot in Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...
and Mexico for 39 days. The director conceived The Argentine as "a Hollywood movie" shot in widescreen 'scope aspect ratio, with the camera either fixed or moving on a dolly or a Steadicam
Steadicam
A Steadicam is a stabilizing mount for a motion picture camera that mechanically isolates it from the operator's movement, allowing a smooth shot even when moving quickly over an uneven surface...
. Guerrilla was shot, according to Soderbergh, "in Super-16, 1.85:1. No dollies, no cranes
Crane shot
In filmmaking and video production a crane shot is a shot taken by a camera on a crane. The most obvious uses are to view the actors from above or to move up and away from them, a common way of ending a movie. Some filmmakers like to have the camera on a boom arm just to make it easier to move...
, it's all either handheld
Hand-held camera
Hand-held camera or hand-held shooting is a filmmaking and video production technique in which a camera is held in the camera operator's hands as opposed to being mounted on a tripod or other base. Hand-held cameras are used because they are conveniently sized for travel and because they allow...
or tripods
Tripod (photography)
In photography, a tripod is used to stabilize and elevate a camera, or to support flashes or other photographic equipment. All photographic tripods have three legs and a mounting head to couple with a camera...
. I want it to look nice but simple. We'll work with a very small group: basically me, the producer Gregory Jacobs and the unit production manager". According to the director, the portion set in Cuba was written from the perspective of the victor and as a result he adopted a more traditional look with classical compositions, vibrant color and a warm palette. With Guerrilla, he wanted a sense of foreboding with hand-held camerawork and a muted color palette. Soderbergh told his production design Antxon Gomez that the first part would have green with a lot of yellow in it and the second part would have green with a lot of blue in it.
At the end of The Argentine, Soderbergh depicts Guevara's derailing of a freight train during the Battle of Santa Clara
Battle of Santa Clara
The Battle of Santa Clara was a series of events in late December 1958 that led to the capture of the Cuban city of Santa Clara by revolutionaries under the command of Che Guevara...
. In filming the sequence, Soderbergh balked at the digital effects solution and managed to reallocate $500,000 from the overall $58 million budget to build a real set of tracks and a train powered by two V-8 car engines. To film the scene, they had six rehearsals, and could only shoot the scene once.
Many aspects of Guevara's personality and beliefs affected the filming process. For instance, close-ups of Del Toro were avoided due to Guevara's belief in collectivism
Collectivism
Collectivism is any philosophic, political, economic, mystical or social outlook that emphasizes the interdependence of every human in some collective group and the priority of group goals over individual goals. Collectivists usually focus on community, society, or nation...
, with Soderbergh remarking, "You can't make a movie about a guy who has these hard-core sort of egalitarian
Egalitarianism
Egalitarianism is a trend of thought that favors equality of some sort among moral agents, whether persons or animals. Emphasis is placed upon the fact that equality contains the idea of equity of quality...
socialist
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
principles and then isolate him with close-ups." According to Edgar Ramirez
Edgar Ramirez
Édgar Filiberto Ramírez Arellano is a Venezuelan actor. He played Carlos in the 2010 French-German biopic series Carlos, a role for which he won the César Award for Most Promising Actor at the César Awards 2011. He also played "Paz", a CIA assassin in the movie The Bourne Ultimatum.Ramírez...
, who portrays Ciro Redondo, the cast "were improvising a lot" while making The Argentine, and he describes the project as a "very contemplative movie", shot chronologically. While filming outdoors, Soderbergh used natural light as much as possible. Del Toro, who speaks Puerto Rican Spanish
Puerto Rican Spanish
Puerto Rican Spanish is the Spanish language as characteristically spoken in Puerto Rico and by millions of people of Puerto Rican descent living in the United States and elsewhere...
, tried to speak the best Argentinean Spanish (Rioplatense Spanish
Rioplatense Spanish
Rioplatense Spanish or River Plate Spanish is a dialectal variant of the Spanish language spoken mainly in the areas in and around the Río de la Plata basin of Argentina and Uruguay, and also in Rio Grande do Sul, although features of the dialect are shared with the varieties of Spanish spoken...
) he could without sounding "stiff". Prior to shooting the final scenes of the film that depict Guevara's time in Bolivia at the end of his life, Del Toro shed 35 pounds to show how ill Guevara had become. The actor shaved the top of his head rather than wear a bald cap for the scenes depicting Guevara's arrival in Bolivia in disguise.
Soderbergh has said that with Che, he wanted to show every day tasks, "things that have meaning on a practical level and on an ideological level", as a "way of showing what it might have been like to be there". While addressing the issue after at the Toronto International Film Festival, Soderbergh remarked that he was trying to avoid what he felt were typical scenes for a biographical film and that he would tell screenwriter Peter Buchman, that he was "trying to find the scenes that would happen before or after the scene that you would typically see in a movie like this". Soderbergh was not interested in depicted Guevara's personal life because he felt that "everybody on these campaigns has a personal life, they all left families behind, that doesn't make him special and why should I go into his personal life and nobody else's?"
Soderbergh decided to omit the post-revolution
Cuban Revolution
The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...
execution sentences of "suspected war criminals, traitors and informants" that Guevara reviewed at La Cabana Fortress because "there is no amount of accumulated barbarity that would have satisfied the people who hate him". Soderbergh addressed the criticism for this omission in a post release interview where he stated: "I don't think anybody now, even in Cuba, is going to sit with a straight face and defend the events. La Cabana was really turned into a Roman circus, where I think even the people in power look back on that as excessive. However, every regime, in order to retain power when it feels threatened, acts excessively ... This is what people do when they feel they need to act in an extreme way to secure themselves". The filmmaker noted as well that, "with a character this complicated, you’re going to have a very polarized reaction". Furthermore, he was not interested in depicting Guevara's life as "a bureaucrat", stating that he was making a diptych
Diptych
A diptych di "two" + ptychē "fold") is any object with two flat plates attached at a hinge. Devices of this form were quite popular in the ancient world, wax tablets being coated with wax on inner faces, for recording notes and for measuring time and direction.In Late Antiquity, ivory diptychs with...
about two military campaigns, declaring the pictures "war films". Soderbergh said, "I'm sure some people will say, 'That's convenient because that's when he was at his worst.' Yeah, maybe — it just wasn't interesting to me. I was interested in making a procedural about guerrilla warfare".
Soderbergh described the Cuban revolution as "the last analog revolution. I loved that we shot a period film about a type of war that can't be fought anymore". Soderbergh has said that he is open to making another film about Guevara's experiences in the Congo but only if Che makes $100 million at the box office.
Distribution
Theatrical distribution rights were pre-sold to distributors in several major territories, including France, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, Italy, and Japan (Nikkatsu); Twentieth Century Fox bought the Spanish theatrical and home video rights. IFC FilmsIFC Films
IFC Films is an American film distribution company based in New York, owned by AMC Networks. It distributes independent films and documentaries under the IFC Films, Sundance Selects and IFC Midnight. It operates the IFC Center....
paid a low seven-figure sum to acquire all North American rights to Che after production had completed and released it on December 12, 2008 in New York City and Los Angeles in order to qualify for the Academy Awards. The "special roadshow edition" in Los Angeles and New York City was initially planned as a one-week special engagement—complete with intermission and including a full-color printed program—but strong box-office results led to its re-opening for two weeks on January 9, 2009 as two separate films, titled Che Part 1: The Argentine and Che Part 2: Guerrilla. Soderbergh said that the inspiration for the program came from the 70 mm engagements for Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is widely acclaimed as one of Hollywood's most innovative and influential film directors...
's Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American war film set during the Vietnam War, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The central character is US Army special operations officer Captain Benjamin L. Willard , of MACV-SOG, an assassin sent to kill the renegade and presumed insane Special Forces...
. The film was expanded to additional markets on January 16 and 22 both as a single film and as two separate films. IFC made the films available through video on demand
Video on demand
Video on Demand or Audio and Video On Demand are systems which allow users to select and watch/listen to video or audio content on demand...
on January 21 on all major cable and satellite providers in both standard and high definition versions.
Screenings
Che was screened on May 21 at the 2008 Cannes Film FestivalCannes Film Festival
The Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...
reportedly running over four hours. After this screening, Soderbergh cut five to seven minutes from each half of the film. It was shown at the 46th New York Film Festival
New York Film Festival
The New York Film Festival has been a major film festival since it began in 1963 in New York. The films are selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center...
and was shown at the 33rd Toronto Film Festival as Che with a 15-minute intermission and as two separate films, The Argentine and Guerrilla, where it was considered the "must-see" film of the festival. Che made its sold-out Los Angeles premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre
Grauman's Chinese Theatre
Grauman's Chinese Theatre is a movie theater at 6925 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood. It is on the historic Hollywood Walk of Fame.The Chinese Theatre was commissioned following the success of the nearby Grauman's Egyptian Theatre which opened in 1922...
on November 1, 2008 as part of the AFI
American Film Institute
The American Film Institute is an independent non-profit organization created by the National Endowment for the Arts, which was established in 1967 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act...
Fest.
Che was screened in Guevara's homeland of Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
in November 2008. To mark the occasion, the streets of Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
were decorated with large posters of Del Toro in his role as the guerrilla fighter, unprecedented in the city's history. When questioned by the press on Guevara's ideas and use of violence, Del Toro stated that if he had lived during the 1960s he would have agreed with Guevara, and that although he did not support violent revolution now, in the sixties he may "have been another person and in agreement with armed war".
Del Toro and Soderbergh both attended the French premiere in late November 2008, where they took questions from the press. Del Toro remarked that the "legendary rebel" was still pertinent because "the things that he fought for in the late 1950s and mid 1960s are still relevant today", adding that "he did not hide behind curtains ... he stood up for the forgotten ones". When asked why he made the film, Soderbergh stated, "I needed to make the film, and that is a different feeling. I felt like, if I am worth anything, I have to say yes. I can't say no". The following day, the Dubai International Film Festival
Dubai International Film Festival
The Dubai International Film Festival is an international film festival based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Launched in 2004, it aims to foster the growth of filmmaking in the Arab world.-Overview:...
would describe Soderbergh's narrative as a "magisterial ... compelling experience", with Del Toro's performance as "blue-chip".
Che opened in single theaters in New York and Los Angeles where it made $60,100 with sellouts of both venues. Based on this success, IFC Films executives added two weekends of exclusive runs for the roadshow version, starting December 24 in New York and December 26 in Los Angeles. This successful run prompted IFC Films to show this version in nine additional markets on January 16. Che will be shown in its entirety, commercial and trailer free with an intermission and limited edition program book at every screening. Soderbergh has said that the roadshow version of the film will not be released on DVD but released in two parts with the animated map that opens the roadshow's second half missing from part II, as well as the overture and intermission music.
According to Variety, it had grossed $164,142 in one weekend, at 35 locations in North America and $20 million from a half-dozen major markets around the world, led by Spain at $9.7 million. As of May 2009, it has grossed $1.4 million in North America and $29.8 million in the rest of the world for a worldwide total of $30 million. Eventually, Che made good profit for IFC Films
IFC Films
IFC Films is an American film distribution company based in New York, owned by AMC Networks. It distributes independent films and documentaries under the IFC Films, Sundance Selects and IFC Midnight. It operates the IFC Center....
.
Cannes reaction
Early reviews of Che were mixed, although there were several critics who spoke glowingly of the project. Cinematicals James Rocchi described the biopic as "expressive, innovative, striking, and exciting" as well as "bold, beautiful, bleak and brilliant". Rocchi went on to brand it "a work of art" that's "not just the story of a revolutionary" but "a revolution in and of itself". Columnist and critic Jeffrey Wells proclaimed the film "brilliant", "utterly believable", and "the most exciting and far-reaching film of the Cannes Film Festival". In further praise, Wells referred to the film as "politically vibrant and searing" while labeling it a "perfect dream movie".Todd McCarthy was more mixed in his reaction to the film in its present form, describing it as "too big a roll of the dice to pass off as an experiment, as it's got to meet high standards both commercially and artistically. The demanding running time forces comparison to such rare works as Lawrence of Arabia
Lawrence of Arabia (film)
Lawrence of Arabia is a 1962 British film based on the life of T. E. Lawrence. It was directed by David Lean and produced by Sam Spiegel through his British company, Horizon Pictures, with the screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson. The film stars Peter O'Toole in the title role. It is widely...
, Reds and other biohistorical epics. Unfortunately, Che doesn’t feel epic — just long". Anne Thompson wrote that Benicio del Toro "gives a great performance", but predicted that "it will not be released as it was seen here". Glenn Kenny wrote, "Che benefits greatly from certain Soderberghian qualities that don't always serve his other films well, e.g., detachment, formalism, and intellectual curiosity".
Peter Bradshaw, in his review for The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
, wrote, "Perhaps it will even come to be seen as this director's flawed masterpiece: enthralling but structurally fractured - the second half is much clearer and more sure-footed than the first — and at times frustratingly reticent, unwilling to attempt any insight into Che's interior world". In his less favorable review for Esquire
Esquire (magazine)
Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...
, Stephen Garrett criticized the film for failing to show Guevara's negative aspects, "the absence of darker, more contradictory revelations of his nature leaves Che bereft of complexity. All that remains is a South American superman: uncomplex, pure of heart, defiantly pious and boring". Richard Corliss
Richard Corliss
Richard Nelson Corliss is a writer for Time magazine who focuses on movies, with the occasional article on music or sports. Corliss is the former editor-in-chief of Film Comment...
had problems with Del Toro's portrayal of Guevara: "Del Toro — whose acting style often starts over the top and soars from there, like a hang-glider leaping from a skyscraper roof — is muted, yielding few emotional revelations, seemingly sedated here ... Che is defined less by his rigorous fighting skills and seductive intellect than by his asthma". In his review for Salon.com, Andrew O'Hehir praised Soderbergh for making "something that people will be eager to see and eager to talk about all over the world, something that feels strangely urgent, something messy and unfinished and amazing. I'd be surprised if Che doesn't win the Palme d'Or ... but be that as it may, nobody who saw it here will ever forget it".
Soderbergh replied to the criticism that he made an unconventional film: "I find it hilarious that most of the stuff being written about movies is how conventional they are, and then you have people ... upset that something's not conventional. The bottom line is we're just trying to give you a sense of what it was like to hang out around this person. That's really it. And the scenes were chosen strictly on the basis of, 'Yeah, what does that tell us about his character?'".
After Cannes, Soderbergh made a few minor adjustments to the film. This included adding a moment of Guevara and Fidel Castro shaking hands, tweaking a few transitions, and tacking on an overture and entr’acte to the "road show" version that will play in major cities. Moreover, he removed the trial of guerrilla Lalo Sardiñas, which Chicago film critic Ben Kenigsberg found "regrettable", stating that it was "not only one of the film's most haunting scenes but a key hint at the darker side of Che's ideology".
NYFF reaction
In her review for The New York TimesThe New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, based on a screening at the New York Film Festival
New York Film Festival
The New York Film Festival has been a major film festival since it began in 1963 in New York. The films are selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center...
, Manohla Dargis
Manohla Dargis
Manohla Dargis is a chief film critic for The New York Times, along with A.O. Scott. She was formerly a chief film critic for the Los Angeles Times, the film editor at the LA Weekly, and a film critic at The Village Voice. She has written for a variety of publications, including Film Comment and...
observes that "throughout the movie Mr. Soderbergh mixes the wild beauty of his landscapes with images of Che heroically engaged in battle, thoughtfully scribbling and reading, and tending to ailing peasants and soldiers". According to Dargis, "Che wins, Che loses, but Che remains the same in what plays like a procedural about a charismatic leader, impossible missions and the pleasures of work and camaraderie", referring to the "historical epic" as "Ocean's Eleven
Ocean's Eleven (2001 film)
Ocean's Eleven is a 2001 American comedy-crime caper and remake of the 1960 Rat Pack caper film of the same name. The 2001 film was directed by Steven Soderbergh and features an ensemble cast including George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Andy García, and Julia Roberts. The film was...
with better cigars". However, Dargis notes that "Mr. Soderbergh cagily evades Che's ugly side, notably his increasing commitment to violence and seemingly endless war, but the movie is without question political — even if it emphasizes romantic adventure over realpolitik — because, like all films, it is predicated on getting, spending and making money".
Film critic Glenn Kenny wrote, "Che seems to me almost the polar opposite of agitprop. It flat out does not ask for the kind of emotional engagement that more conventional epic biopics do, and that's a good thing". In his review for UGO, Keith Uhlich wrote, "The best to say about Del Toro's Cannes-honored performance is that it's exhausting — all exterior, no soul, like watching an android run a gauntlet (one that includes grueling physical exertions, tendentious political speechifying, and risible Matt Damon
Matt Damon
Matthew Paige "Matt" Damon is an American actor, screenwriter, and philanthropist whose career was launched following the success of the film Good Will Hunting , from a screenplay he co-wrote with friend Ben Affleck...
cameos)". Slant magazine gave Che two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "The problem is that, despite his desire to sidestep Hollywood bio-hooey, the director is unable to turn his chilly stance into an ideological perspective, like Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini was an Italian film director and screenwriter. Rossellini was one of the directors of the Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as Roma città aperta to the movement.-Early life:Born in Rome, Roberto Rossellini lived on the Via Ludovisi, where Benito Mussolini had...
did in his demythologized portraits of Louis XIV, Garibaldi and Pascal
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal , was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen...
".
In his review for Salon magazine, Andrew O'Hehir wrote, "What Soderbergh has sought to capture here is a grand process of birth and extinguishment, one that produced a complicated legacy in which John McCain
John McCain
John Sidney McCain III is the senior United States Senator from Arizona. He was the Republican nominee for president in the 2008 United States election....
, Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
and Raúl Castro are still enmeshed. There will be plenty of time to argue about the film's (or films') political relevance or lack thereof, to call Soderbergh names for this or that historical omission, for this or that ideological error. He's made something that people will be eager to see and eager to talk about all over the world, something that feels strangely urgent, something messy and unfinished and amazing".
Miami screening and protest
On December 4, 2008, Che premiered in Miami Beach at the Byron Carlyle Theatre, as part of the Art BaselArt Basel
Art Basel is an international contemporary art fair held each June in Basel, Switzerland. Similar to the Venice Biennale, it has been called "the Olympics of the art world". Art Basel features nearly 300 leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa...
Festival. Taking place only a few miles from Little Havana, which is home to the largest Cuban-American community in the United States, the invitation-only screening was met with angry demonstrators. The organization Vigilia Mambisa, led by Miguel Saavedra, amassed an estimated 100 demonstrators to decry what they believed would be a favorable depiction of Guevara. Saavedra told reporters from the El Nuevo Herald
El Nuevo Herald
El Nuevo Herald is a McClatchy newspaper published daily in Spanish in Miami, Florida, in the United States. El Nuevo Heralds sister paper is The Miami Herald, also produced by the McClatchy Company.-About El Nuevo Herald:...
that "you can not offend the sensitivities of the people", while describing the film as "a disgrace". A supporter of the demonstration, Miami Beach's mayor Matti Herrera Bower
Matti Herrera Bower
Matti Herrera Bower is a Cuban-born American politician and retired dental assistant. Bower has been elected to three two-year terms as the Mayor of Miami Beach, Florida, beginning in 2007. Most recently, Bower won re-election to her third and final term on November 1, 2011. She is the first woman,...
, lamented that the film was shown, while declaring "we must not allow dissemination of this movie". When asked days later about the incident, Del Toro remarked that the ability to speak out was "part of what makes America great" while adding "I find it a little weird that they were protesting without having seen the film, but that's another matter". For his part, Soderbergh later stated that "you have to separate the Cuban nationalist lobby that is centered in Miami from the rest of the country".
Cuban homecoming
On December 7, 2008, Che premiered at Havana's 5,000+ person Karl Marx TheaterKarl Marx Theater
The Karl Marx Theater is a theater in Havana, Cuba, formerly known as the Teatro Blanquita, and renamed after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the venue has an enormous auditorium with seating capacity of 5500 people, and is generally used for big shows by stars from Cuba and abroad...
as part of the Latin American Film Festival. Benicio Del Toro, who was in attendance, referred to the film as "Cuban history", while remarking that "there's an audience in there ... that could be the most knowledgeable critics of the historical accuracy of the film". The official state paper Granma
Granma (newspaper)
Granma is the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party.Its name comes from the yacht Granma that carried Fidel Castro and 81 other rebels to Cuba's shores in 1956 launching the Cuban Revolution.-Editions:...
gave Del Toro a glowing review, professing that he "personifies Che" in both his physical appearance and his "masterly interpretation". After unveiling Che in Havana's Yara Cinema, Del Toro was treated to a 10-minute standing ovation from the 2,000+ strong audience, many of whom were involved in the revolution.
New York City debut
On December 12, 2008, Che was screened at the sold out 1,100 person Ziegfeld Theater in New York City. Upon seeing the first image on the screen (a silhouette of Cuba), the crowd erupted into a raucous cry of "¡Viva, Cuba!" Following the film, and the standing ovation it received, Soderbergh appeared for a post program Q&A. During the sometimes contentious conversation with the audience, in which Soderbergh alternated between defensiveness and modesty, the director categorized Guevara as "a hard ass", to which one audience member yelled out, "Bullshit, he was a murderer!" The filmmaker settled down the crowd and explained, "It doesn't matter whether I agree with him or not — I was interested in Che as a warrior, Che as a guy who had an ideology, who picked up a gun and this was the result. He died the way you would have him die. He was executed the way you would say he executed other people". Soderbergh ended the 1 am Q&A session by noting that he was "agnostic" on Che's standing, but "loyal to the facts", which he insisted were all rigorously sourced.Venezuela and President Chávez
On March 3, 2009, Venezuelan President Hugo ChávezHugo Chávez
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías is the 56th and current President of Venezuela, having held that position since 1999. He was formerly the leader of the Fifth Republic Movement political party from its foundation in 1997 until 2007, when he became the leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela...
, himself an avowed socialist and admirer of Che Guevara, greeted Del Toro and co star Bichir at the Presidential Palace in Caracas
Caracas
Caracas , officially Santiago de León de Caracas, is the capital and largest city of Venezuela; natives or residents are known as Caraquenians in English . It is located in the northern part of the country, following the contours of the narrow Caracas Valley on the Venezuelan coastal mountain range...
. The day prior Del Toro attended a screening of the film at a bull-fighting ring-turned cultural center, where he was "mobbed by adoring fans". Del Toro then visited the state-run Cinema Town, a film production facility President Chávez launched to help Venezuela produce its own movies as an alternative to what Chávez calls Hollywood's
Cinema of the United States
The cinema of the United States, also known as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period...
"cultural imperialism
Cultural imperialism
Cultural imperialism is the domination of one culture over another. Cultural imperialism can take the form of a general attitude or an active, formal and deliberate policy, including military action. Economic or technological factors may also play a role...
." Del Toro described Che as "a totally Latin American movie" and stated that he had "a good meeting with the President".
General reviews
Che: Part One has a 71% rating at Rotten TomatoesRotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
, while Che: Part 2 has a 76% rating. Scott Foundas of the LA Weekly
LA Weekly
LA Weekly is a free weekly tabloid-sized "alternative weekly" in Los Angeles, California. It was founded in 1978 by Editor/Publisher Jay Levin and a board of directors that included actor-producer Michael Douglas...
proclaimed Che "nothing if not the movie of the year". In his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman
J. Hoberman
James Lewis Hoberman , also known as J. Hoberman, is an American film critic. He is currently the senior film critic for The Village Voice, a post he has held since 1988.-Education:...
wrote, "At its best, Che is both action film and ongoing argument. Each new camera setup seeks to introduce a specific idea—about Che or his situation—and every choreographed battle sequence is a sort of algorithm where the camera attempts to inscribe the event that is being enacted". Hoberman compared Soderbergh's directing style and "non-personalized" historical approach on the film to Otto Preminger
Otto Preminger
Otto Ludwig Preminger was an Austro–Hungarian-American theatre and film director.After moving from the theatre to Hollywood, he directed over 35 feature films in a five-decade career. He rose to prominence for stylish film noir mysteries such as Laura and Fallen Angel...
's observational use of the moving camera, or one of Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini was an Italian film director and screenwriter. Rossellini was one of the directors of the Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as Roma città aperta to the movement.-Early life:Born in Rome, Roberto Rossellini lived on the Via Ludovisi, where Benito Mussolini had...
's "serene" documentaries. Armond White
Armond White
Armond White is a New York-based film and music critic known for his provocative and idiosyncratic film criticism, which some have characterized as contrarian. He is currently the editor of City Arts, for which he also writes articles and reviews...
, in his review for the New York Press
New York Press
New York Press was a free alternative weekly in New York City, that was published from 1988 to 2011. During its lifetime, it was the main competitor to the Village Voice...
, wrote, "Out-perversing Gus Van Sant
Gus Van Sant
Gus Green Van Sant, Jr. is an American director, screenwriter, painter, photographer, musician, and author. He is a two time nominee of the Academy Award for Best Director for his 1997 film Good Will Hunting and his 2008 film Milk, both of which were also nominated for Best Picture, and won the...
's Milk
Milk (film)
Milk is a 2008 American biographical film on the life of gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk, who was the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors...
, Soderbergh makes a four-hour-plus biopic about a historical figure without providing a glimmer of charm or narrative coherence". In his review for The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, A.O. Scott writes, "Mr. Soderbergh once again offers a master class in filmmaking. As history, though, Che is finally not epic but romance. It takes great care to be true to the factual record, but it is, nonetheless, a fairy tale". Sheri Linden, in her review for the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
, wrote, "in this flawed work of austere beauty, the logistics of war and the language of revolution give way to something greater, a struggle that may be defined by politics but can't be contained by it". In her review for the Washington Post, Ann Hornaday wrote, "The best way to encounter Che, is to let go of words like 'film' and 'movie', words that somehow seem inadequate to the task of describing such a mesmerizing, fully immersive cinematic experience. By the end of Che, viewers will likely emerge as if from a trance, with indelibly vivid, if not more ambivalent feelings about Guevara, than the bumper-sticker image they walked in with".
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
gave a "B+" rating to the first half of the film and a "C-" rating to the second half, and Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman is an American film critic for Entertainment Weekly, a position he has held since the magazine's launch in 1990. From 1981–89, he worked at the Boston Phoenix....
wrote, "As political theater, Che moves from faith to impotence, which is certainly a valid reading of Communism in the 20th century. Yet as drama, that makes the second half of the film borderline deadly ... Che is twice as long as it needs to be, but it is also only half the movie it should have been". James Verniere of The Boston Herald gave the film a B-, describing the work as a new genre of "arthouse guerrilla nostalgia", while lamenting Che as the film version of Alberto Korda
Alberto Korda
Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, better known as Alberto Korda or simply Korda was a Cuban photographer, remembered for his famous image Guerrillero Heroico of Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara.-Early life:Korda, whose real name was Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, was born on 14 September 1928 in...
’s iconic 1960 photograph Guerrillero Heroico
Guerrillero Heroico
Guerrillero Heroico is an iconic photo of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara wearing his black beret taken by Alberto Korda. It was taken on March 5, 1960, in Havana, Cuba, at a memorial service for victims of the La Coubre explosion and by the end of the 1960s turned the charismatic and...
. In Verniere's view, so much information was missing, that he recommended one first see The Motorcycle Diaries
The Motorcycle Diaries (film)
At the end of the film, after his sojourn at the leper colony, Guevara confirms his nascent egalitarian, anti-authority impulses, while making a birthday toast, which is also his first political speech. In it he evokes a pan-Latin American identity that transcends both the arbitrary boundaries of...
to fill in the background. In her review for USA Today
USA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
, Claudia Puig wrote, "With its lyrical beauty and strong performances, the film can be riveting. Its excessive length and rambling scenes also make it maddening. It is worth seeing for its attention to visual detail and ambitious filmmaking, but as a psychological portrait of a compelling historical figure, it is oddly bland and unrevealing". Anthony Lane
Anthony Lane
Anthony Lane is a film critic for The New Yorker magazine.-Personal life:Lane lives in Cambridge with Allison Pearson, a British writer and former Daily Mail columnist...
, in his review for The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, wrote, "for all the movie’s narrative momentum, Che retains the air of a study exercise—of an interest brilliantly explored. How else to explain one’s total flatness of feeling at the climax of each movie?" Taking a more positive stance, film critic Chris Barsanti compared Che to a "guerrilla take on Patton
Patton (film)
Patton is a 1970 American biographical war film about U.S. General George S. Patton during World War II. It stars George C. Scott, Karl Malden, Michael Bates, and Karl Michael Vogler. It was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner from a script by Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H...
", calling it "an exceptionally good" war film, which rivaled The Battle of Algiers in its "you-are-there sensibility". Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
awarded the film 3.5 our of 4 stars and addressed the film's length: "You may wonder if the film is too long. I think there's a good reason for its length. Guevara's experience in Cuba and especially Bolivia was not a series of events and anecdotes, but a trial of endurance that might almost be called mad".
Film Comment
Film Comment
Film Comment is an arts and culture magazine published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, of which it is the official publication. Film Comment features critical reviews and in-depth analysis of mainstream, art-house, and avant-garde filmmaking from around the world...
ranked Che as the 22nd best film of 2008 in their "Best Films of 2008" poll.
Film critics Roger Ebert, and James Rocchi
James Rocchi
James Rocchi is a freelance film critic living and working in Los Angeles. He currently writes reviews for MSN.com, amctv.com, Redbox, Mother Jones Magazine and other outlets. He is a current member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Society, the Online Film Critics Society and the Broadcast Film...
went further, naming Che one of the best films of 2008. The film appeared on several critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2008.
Looking back at the experience of making Che, Soderbergh has said that he now wishes that he had not made the film and remarked, "Literally I'd wake up and think, 'At least I'm not doing that today.'" The director blamed piracy for the film's financial failure and felt that "It's a film that, to some extent, needs the support of people who write about films. If you'd had all these guys running around talking in accented English you'd [have got] your head taken off".
Awards
Benicio Del Toro was awarded the Prix d'interpretation masculineBest Actor Award (Cannes Film Festival)
The Best Actor Award is an award presented at the Cannes Film Festival. It is chosen by the jury from the 'official section' of movies at the festival. It was first awarded in 1946.- Award Winners :-External links:* * ....
(or Best Actor Award) at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance in Che and in his acceptance speech dedicated his award "to the man himself, Che Guevara and I want to share this with Steven Soderbergh. He was there pushing it even when there [were lulls] and pushing all of us". Guevara's widow Aleida March, who is president of the Che Guevara Studies Center, sent a congratulatory note to Del Toro upon hearing the news of his award. Del Toro was awarded a 2009 Goya Award as the best Spanish Lead Actor
Goya Award for Best Actor
The Goya Award for Best Actor is one of the Goya Awards, Spain's principal national film awards....
for his depiction of Che. Actor Sean Penn
Sean Penn
Sean Justin Penn is an American actor, screenwriter and film director, also known for his political and social activism...
, who won an Oscar
81st Academy Awards
The 81st Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , honored the best films of 2008 and took place February 22, 2009, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles beginning at 5:30 p.m. PST / 8:30 p.m. EST...
for his role in Milk
Milk (film)
Milk is a 2008 American biographical film on the life of gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk, who was the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors...
, remarked that he was surprised and disappointed that Che and Del Toro were not also up for any Academy Award nominations. During his acceptance speech for the Best Actor's trophy at the Screen Actors Guild Awards
15th Screen Actors Guild Awards
----Best Cast - Motion Picture: Slumdog Millionaire----Best Cast - Drama Series: Mad Men Best Cast - Comedy Series: 30 Rock ...
Penn expressed his dismay stating, "The fact that there aren't crowns on Soderbergh's and Del Toro's heads right now, I don't understand ... that is such a sensational movie, Che." In reference to what Penn deemed a snub, he added "Maybe because it's in Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, maybe the length, maybe the politics".
On July 31, 2009, Del Toro was awarded the inaugural Tomas Gutierrez Alea
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea was a Cuban filmmaker. He wrote and directed more than 20 features, documentaries, and short films, which are known for his sharp insight into post-Revolutionary Cuba, and possess a delicate balance between dedication to the revolution and criticism of the social, economic,...
prize at a Havana ceremony attended by U.S. actors Robert Duvall
Robert Duvall
Robert Selden Duvall is an American actor and director. He has won an Academy Award, two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards and a BAFTA over the course of his career....
, James Caan and Bill Murray
Bill Murray
William James "Bill" Murray is an American actor and comedian. He first gained national exposure on Saturday Night Live in which he earned an Emmy Award and later went on to star in a number of critically and commercially successful comedic films, including Caddyshack , Ghostbusters , and...
. Named after a prolific Cuban filmmaker, the new award was voted for by the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba
National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba
The National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba is a social, cultural and professional organization of writers, musicians, actors, painters, sculptors, and artist of different genres. It was founded on August 22, 1961, by the Cuban poet, Nicolas Guillen...
. Del Toro remarked that it was "an honor" to receive the award and thanked Che director Steven Soderbergh.
Che was also awarded "The White Camel", the top award handed out at the sixth annual International Sahara Film Festival
Sahara Film Festival
The International Sahara Film Festival was first held in 2004. It is now an annual event which takes place in the Sahrawi refugee camps in the South West Corner of Algeria, near the border with Western Sahara. The Festival is backed by the Polisario Front...
, whose ceremony took place during the spring of 2009 in
Dakhla
Dakhla, Western Sahara
-External links:**...
, Western Sahara
Western Sahara
Western Sahara is a disputed territory in North Africa, bordered by Morocco to the north, Algeria to the northeast, Mauritania to the east and south, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. Its surface area amounts to . It is one of the most sparsely populated territories in the world, mainly...
at a Sahrawi refugee camp of 30,000 residents. Executive producer Alvaro Longoria, attended to accept the award when Del Toro couldn't because of filming for The Wolf Man. After dismounting the prize (which was a literal camel
Camel
A camel is an even-toed ungulate within the genus Camelus, bearing distinctive fatty deposits known as humps on its back. There are two species of camels: the dromedary or Arabian camel has a single hump, and the bactrian has two humps. Dromedaries are native to the dry desert areas of West Asia,...
) Longoria remarked that "this is real, this is what Benicio and Steven tried to tell in the movie. It’s right here, a people fighting a war for their dignity and their land. The principles of Che Guevara
Che Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...
are very important to them." However, Longoria gave back the live animal before departing, opting for a camel statuette in its place.
Home DVD release
The film was released on Region 1 DVDDVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
in January 2009 exclusively from Blockbuster for 60 days as per an agreement with IFC. The Criterion Collection was originally scheduled to release the film on Region 1 Blu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...
in December 2009. However, the release date was re-scheduled to January 19, 2010. The two-disc Blu-ray release features 1080p video and a Spanish DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack (with English subtitles).
Supplements include:
- Audio commentaries on both films featuring Jon Lee AndersonJon Lee AndersonJon Lee Anderson is a biographer, author, international investigative reporter, and staff writer for The New Yorker, reporting from warzone locales such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Uganda, Israel, El Salvador, Ireland, Lebanon, Iran, and throughout the Middle East. Anderson has also written for The New...
- author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life. - Making Che - a new 50 minute documentary about the film's production, featuring interviews with Soderbergh, producer Laura Bickford, actor-producer Benicio del Toro, and writers Peter Buchman and Ben van der Veen.
- Che and the Digital Revolution - a new 33 minute documentary that goes into detail about the Red One Camera technology that was so crucial to the film's production.
- End of a Revolution - a 26 minute 1968 documentary by Brian Moser who was in Bolivia looking for Che when Che was executed. The film features interviews with then Bolivian President René BarrientosRené BarrientosRené Barrientos Ortuño was a Bolivian politician who served as his country's Vice President in 1964 and as its President from 1964 to 1969....
as well as members of U.S. Special Forces involved with the hunt for Che. - New interviews with Cuban historians (12 minutes) as well as participants in the 1958 Cuban Revolution and Che's 1967 Bolivian campaign (23 minutes).
- Deleted scenes - Part One (15 minutes) and Part Two (5 minutes).
- Theatrical trailers
- A 20 page booklet featuring an essay by film critic Amy TaubinAmy TaubinAmy Taubin is an American film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment...
. - A small fold-out poster identical to the box cover art.
See also
- Che Guevara in film
- Media related to Che Guevara
- The Motorcycle Diaries (film)The Motorcycle Diaries (film)At the end of the film, after his sojourn at the leper colony, Guevara confirms his nascent egalitarian, anti-authority impulses, while making a birthday toast, which is also his first political speech. In it he evokes a pan-Latin American identity that transcends both the arbitrary boundaries of...
Further reading
- Movie Can Clarify Vision of Rebel Che Guevara by Gary Olson, Baltimore Chronicle, February 15, 2008
- Dammit, This Guy is Cool by Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian, November 29, 2008
- Soderbergh Brings his Guevara Epic to Miami by Tim Elfrink, Miami New Times, December 9, 2008
- Revolution in Shades of Gray by Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com, December 12, 2008
- Che: The Inspiring Life of a Vibrant Revolutionary by The Socialist Worker, December 15, 2008
- Che, Cannes and Hi-Def Video by Scott Foundas, Los Angeles Weekly, January 14, 2009
- Becoming Che by Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle, January 23, 2009
- Benicio del Toro Talks About Che: The Man And The Movie by Peter Kornbluh, The Huffington Post, February 2, 2009
- Behold the Man: Steven Soderbergh's Epic Film Biography of Che by J. Hoberman, Virginian Quarterly Review, Winter 2009 Issue
- The Young Castro Comes Alive Through Actor Demian Bichir's Performance by Brad Balfour, The Huffington Post, May 8, 2009
- Che’s Revolutionary Example by Stuart Munckton, Green Left, October 25, 2009
External links
- Official American Trailer
- Che Teaser Trailer (UK)
- Part 2 Trailer (UK)
- Official International Site
- Official UK site
- Official IFC Site
Multimedia
- Photo Gallery: Del Toro as Che from the New York Post
- CNN Video Interview: "Soderbergh on Che" ----> Part 1 / Part 2
- MSNBC's Morning Joe: Video Interview with Benicio Del Toro
- NPR Audio Report: Benicio Del Toro Takes On Che
- Time Magazine Photo Essay: Behind the Scenes on the Set of Che
- Guardian Video Interview: Benicio del Toro on Che Guevara: "He was not Tarzan"