Traveling With Che Guevara

In 1952, 23-year-old Ernesto Che Guevara, who was a medical student at the time, and his friend, the 29-year-old biologist Alberto Granado, embarked upon a journey across the entire South American continent. During the course of six months, these two men traversed Argentina, Chile, Peru, Columbia and Venezuela. Setting out initially on a rather dilapidated Norton 500, but later travelling as hitchhikers, the men experienced at first hand the plight of the rural population of South America. Che Guevara recorded his impressions of the trip in a diary. In 2002, Brazilian director Walter Salles made a feature film about the odyssey undertaken by the later revolutionary figure and his friend; the film was entitled THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES. Gianni Minà helped the filmmakers make contact with Guevara’s family and with Alberto Granado.
For the now 81-year-old Granado, the making of Salles’ film became a moving journey into his own past – which Gianni Minà decided to turn into a film of his own. The resulting work is a road movie about a man looking back on his youth, recalling a journey of fifty years previously that was to make such a lasting impression on him. Minà’s documentary returns to the major destinations of the 1952 trip, such as Santiago, Valparaiso, the Atacama desert, Cuzco, Iquitos and the mines of Chuquicamata - where two miners actually remember Che and his friend.