The New York Film Festival Presents a the Film: Che

Che
Steven Soderbergh, France/Spain, 2008; 268m
This screening will include a 30-minute intermission.

The most eagerly awaited event at Cannes last May, Steven Soderbergh’s sweeping, Spanish-language meditation on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare focuses on the two key episodes in Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s military career. Benicio Del Toro (Best Actor at Cannes) brilliantly embodies the Argentine-born revolutionary, but Che is hardly a biopic. Rather, it’s a structuralist epic that in the tradition of Roberto Rossellini’s historical dramas objectively ponders the flow of history. The first two hours, mainly set in the late 1950s, concern the miraculous success of the Cuban Revolution. The second part dwells in harrowing detail on Guevara’s doomed attempt to repeat this victory a decade later in Bolivia. At once boldly simplified and massively detailed, this didactic, dialectical and dazzlingly choreographed combat film challenges us to confront a figure as relevant to our times as he was to his own.

WHEN

Tue Oct 07
6pm

WHERE

Ziegfeld Theater
141 West 54th Street (btwn 6th & 7th Aves)
Midtown
Manjátan

212-307-1862
website

DIRECTIONS

B/D, E to 7th Ave

One Comment

  1. David:
    I remember that there was a movie about Che made a number of years ago (15 -20?). Is this movie a remake of the older one? Che has always been tauted as some type of messianic figure without any of the religious connotations? The hope of Latin America and other places in the developing world. Actually he is a sad figure in history. The only glorious death is that of a saint passing from this life to the eternal life promised by the Savior. All others are counterfeits.

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