Che Guevara is the undisputed poster boy of 20th-century revolutions. With his mustache and signature beret, he is perpetually popular, appearing on T-shirts all over the world — even though he died in 1967 at 39 after leading a crusade to foment revolutions all over Latin America.
Less widely known is that Guevara was accompanied on his continental struggle by about 50 fellow revolutionaries, most of whom died within a year of him.
A new documentary premiering at the Cannes Film Festival — “Che Guevara: The Last Companions,” directed by Christophe Dimitri Réveille and presented in the festival’s special screenings section — tells the story of Guevara’s last surviving comrades in arms: three men who battled incredible odds to keep up the struggle and who lived long enough to bear witness.
The documentary opens with a dramatic scene: people file past the body of Guevara (whose real name was Ernesto Guevara), some taking pictures. This is October 1967; the guerrilla leader has just been shot and killed by troops in a village school in Bolivia.
A few hundred feet away, six of his fellow fighters are hiding in the trees as combat helicopters hover above, searching for them. Unaware that their leader has just been executed, they pledge to fight to the last man.
Only three survive: Pombo (Harry Villegas), Guevara’s loyal lieutenant; Urbano (Leonardo Tamayo Núñez), the son of a peasant farmer who joins the armed struggle at 15 and becomes Guevara’s messenger (he’s the only one still living today); and Benigno (Daniel Alarcón Ramírez), a peasant farmer whose wife is murdered before his very eyes and who becomes a captain in Che’s rebel army.
These are the film’s protagonists. For five grueling months, they avoid capture by more than 4,000 Bolivian soldiers, travel across 1,500 miles of dangerous terrain and survive hunger, thirst and fatal injury. Their story is told through filmed interviews, footage of locations in Bolivia, and — for added dramatic intensity — segments of animation.
In a recent video interview, Réveille spoke of his interest in Che and his loyal combatants. The conversation was conducted in French and has been edited and condensed.
How did you come across the story of these three men?
My father took me on a trip to Cuba in 1997, at a time when they were bringing back the remains of Che Guevara. I realized that I really didn’t know much about him, and that I needed to find out more. I read a book about Che, and discovered that there were Cubans who had survived his death. One of them, Benigno, had defected and been sentenced to death for treason by Cuban leader Fidel Castro. He was living in France.
It took me a year and a half to meet Benigno. When I did, his publishers said I could make a documentary about him so long as I finished his biography first. I thought to myself: This man is sentenced to death. I will film everything he says and have it translated for the record, in case something happens to him.
The biography came out in 2006. In parallel, I started making a documentary about him. I came across archives and met the actor Benicio Del Toro, who was starring in Steven Soderbergh’s 2008 biopic, “Che.” Del Toro gave me the idea of making a documentary about all of them, but he also told me that it was impossible to see them all; Soderbergh and his team had tried.
I thought: Maybe there is something that can be done. I made a first trip to Bolivia to meet people and go through the archives. After a while, I realized that I could get them all. It took 20 years of hard work.
Why did you initially want to make a documentary about Benigno?
I found him interesting. This wasn’t somebody who took up armed struggle for reasons of ideology, but because he watched Cuban forces kill his pregnant wife. He lost everything. They even killed his dog.
I have always been interested in people who live in the shadows. The first documentary I worked on was about Jack Waltzer, a lifetime member of the Actors Studio in New York and a major acting coach, whom nobody has heard of.
Dustin Hoffman, Robert Duvall, and Jon Voight were all in the film, because they worked with him.
Che is in all the history books. I have focused on people who carry out revolutions, yet whose names don’t appear anywhere.
Why are you interested in unsung heroes, in people who might be described as underdogs?
You can understand the big stories when you approach them through little stories. Also — and this is a private matter, but I don’t mind sharing it — I lost my mother when I was 17. And on that day, I decided that I would go wherever I had previously been afraid to go.
Until then, I had been a homebody. My parents always said it was best to save money now and travel later. But from then on, I traveled very far.
These survivors gave a real meaning to my life.
I was a boy who had plunged into anorexia, drugs, the whole thing. And one day I came across this story. I realized that there were men who were even more lost than I was, and who decided to live their life for their ideal. I realized that, in life, there are greater things than us, greater sufferings.
Had I come across their story earlier, it would have stopped me from drifting for years, not knowing what to do with myself.
Are these men heroes to you?
Yes. They are heroes because they achieve the impossible — but not for their own sake. These are not men who are out for themselves. They want to come out alive so that they can rearm and resume the struggle.
They are also very sensitive to injustice.
Because they have suffered it. One of them remembers seeing peasant farmers be beaten up in front of his eyes.
Another talks about his wife being killed.
Because they’ve lost everything, their life doesn’t have much meaning anymore. That’s why they follow Che.
Che Guevara is the reason there is public interest in your film and why the Cannes Festival has selected it. What do you think of him?
There are times when I can admire him, but I have the impression that, eventually, he reached a point of no return. The reasons why he got engaged in the struggle are legitimate, but the way he went about changing the world can be questioned.
Starting revolutions is interesting, but when they’re won, they transform. Often, the people who led the revolution are betrayed by it. A lot of idealists are inevitably disappointed, because they find themselves on the side of the oppressors.
How did you react when you found out you had been selected for a special screening at Cannes?
I was happy, and at the same time I could feel only sadness, thinking that Benigno would never see it.
I was so sad that I promised myself I would visit Benigno’s grave before going to Cannes — to tell him I did it. I hope Urbano is going to see it. He is the only one of the three men who is still living.
It’s funny that this documentary should end up at the Cannes Festival.
Even if it had hit a wall, I would have had no choice but to finish it — because this film just had to be made.
