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The Motorcycle Diaries - Diarios de motocicleta
Dir: Walter Salles UK / USA / France 2004 125 mins 15PG
Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Mia Maestro, Rodrigo De La Serna, Ulises Dumont
It was in January 1952 that the 23-year-old Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (Bernal) set out from Buenos Aires with his family friend Alberto Grenado (Serna) on a clapped-out old Norton motorbike. The products of well-to-do middle-class Argentine upbringings, both wanted to fulfil a restless urge to see the rest of South America before settling down to their medical careers. The aim: to reach Venezuela, by way of the Andes, the Chilean and the Peruvian Amazon, by the time Alberto celebrated his 30th birthday.
At the onset, Guevara and his carefree comrade-in-adventure resembled far more Latin versions of Jack Kerouac than they did rebellious insurgents on a mission to tackle the social injustices of the oppressed. Sex and general carousing occupied far more of their rollicking minds than politics. But with every mechanical disaster and subsequent need for food and shelter came ever more painful collisions with the South American underbelly. Their adventures bring them face-to-face with Indian farmers thrown off their cultivated lands, with ugly urban sprawls that have replaced their continent’s magnificent Incan heritage and with communist sympathisers banished to a life in the mines – assuming they can even get the miserable work.
Eventually, they end up helping out in the largest leper colony in South America, right in the heart of the Amazon, by which time Ernesto and Alberto have seen their consciousnesses raised and their destinies altered.
A stirringly compassionate road movie that charts Ernesto "Che" Guevara’s political awakening over the course of one seminal year, Motorcycle Diaries proved the early revelation at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. But this is not about Che, the poster boy of student radicals and guerilla-fatigue fashionistas the world over but the personal odyssey of Grenado, his lusty companion, as they traverse the South American continent in what would prove a turning point year in their lives.
“A Triumph.” - The Observer
“Gael Garcia Bernal’s landmark performance.” - Daily Telegraph
“Breathtaking.” - Evening Standards
“Walter Salles and his inspired team of collaborators delight in simply documenting the telling human and vivid geographical details that would eventually form the future revolutionary leader; The affecting result illuminates the legend more than any conventional screen biography could hope to.” - Screen International
Winner - Best Foreign Lanaguage Film / BAFTA Awards 2005
Winner - Best Adapted Script / Goya Awards 2005
Winner - Best Song / Academy Awards 2005
Winner - Hollywood World Award 2004
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