Tribeca film looks into story of Che Guevara image

By Michelle Nichols

NEW YORK (Reuters) -
It is said to be the most reproduced
photo in the world. But just who is Ernesto "Che" Guevara and
what has the photo of him, taken at a funeral for victims of an
explosion in Cuba's Havana Harbor, come to mean?

"Isn't he the guy who invented mojitos?" says an American
man wearing a T-shirt of the image in "Chevolution," a film
about Cuban Alberto Korda's photo of the revolutionary that
premiered at New York's Tribeca Film Festival.

The image has been reproduced around the world on T-shirts,
mugs, baseball caps, vodka bottles, cigarette packets, watches,
bikinis and other products of a capitalist consumer society
that he fought against.

"Ernesto was a bit sarcastic," says Carlos "Calica" Ferrer,
an Argentine friend of Guevara, in the 90-minute documentary.
"I'm sure he would be laughing about it."

British curator Trisha Ziff, who co-directed "Chevolution"
with Mexican Luis Lopez, said the film grew from an exhibition
she created on representations of the photo of Guevara, who was
killed in Bolivia in 1967 by Bolivian troops at age 39.

She told Reuters she was surprised by the "ignorance in
relation to an American youth audience who would wear him on
their T-shirt and not have any idea about the ideology, the
ideas of this man."

"It comes back to ideas and hope and our desire within
humanity to have heroes," Ziff said. "He became folklore. He's
a Robin Hood in a way, it's as basic as that."

Guevara remains a national hero in Cuba, remembered for
promoting unpaid voluntary work by toiling shirtless on
building sites or hauling sacks of sugar. He still appears on
banknotes cutting sugar cane in the fields.

He left Cuba in 1966 to start a new anti-U.S. rebellion in
the jungle of eastern Bolivia, hoping to create "two, three,
many Vietnams" in Latin America.

"Chevolution" explains the story behind the 1960 photo,
which was only published once in a Cuban newspaper in the year
after it was taken before emerging in Europe seven years later
as a symbol of protest and dissent. Its popularity grew after
Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick created a copyright-free poster
using the image in 1968.

(Editing by Daniel Trotta and Eric Beech)

This content was originally posted on http://entertainews.blogspot.com/ © 2008 If you are not reading this text from the above site, you are reading a splog