The Great Dictators: ‘el comandante’ Fidel Castro

The Great Dictators # 04 | Wednesday| January 13, 2009 | Films starts 21:00 hrs

‘COMANDANTE’

Documentary by Oliver Stone, 2002, 96 min.

Named after Fidel Castro’s nickname and military rank, Comandante is a
93-minute documentary taken from the over 30 hours of interview
footage between the Cuban leader and filmmaker Oliver Stone. Capturing
Stone’s February 2002 trip to Cuba, the film includes three days of
conversation between the two men in places like the Terraza restaurant
in Cohima. Discussing his youth and rise to power, Castro also talks
about the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. embargo, and Cuba’s place in
the world.

Stone asks Castro some of the softest, most straightforward questions
imaginable and ensures that his subject knows he holds all the cards.
At one point, Castro questions whether it’s bad to be a dictator. This
should be a key point at which Stone could bring up the subject of
political repression and human rights but instead, Stone keeps schtum
and goes back to a more personal line of questioning. However, for all
its total lack of bite, it is still a fascinating film.

After Fidel’s crackdown on dissidents in the year of Comandante’s
release, the ‘uncritical’ documentary was banned from the New York
Tribeca film festival and HBO postponed its broadcast stating that
current events made the film ‘incomplete’. The network asked Oliver
Stone to return to Cuba and interview Castro again with recent events
in mind.

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THE GREAT DICTATORS
Monthly film night at De Verdieping, the cultural project space of
TrouwAmsterdam, focussing on ‘the vanity of evil’. Each night centers
around one absolute ruler, both past and present, and shows how
tyrants and populist leaders are (re)presented in (documentary) films.