With a highly romantic sense of adventure, the two friends leave their familiar surroundings in Buenos Aires on ‘The Mighty One’ – a rickety 1939 Norton 500. Although the bike breaks down in the course of the eight month journey, they press onward, hitching rides along the way. As they start to see a different Latin America in the people they meet on the road, the diverse geography they encounter begins to reflect their own shifting perspectives. They continue to the heights of Machu Picchu, where the majestic ruins and the extraordinary significance of the Inca heritage have a profound impact on the young men. When they arrive at a leper colony deep in the Peruvian Amazon, the two are beginning to question the value of progress as defined by economic systems that leave so many people beyond their reach. Their experiences at the colony awaken within them the men they will later become.
Film Crew
- : Walter Salles
- : Jose Rivera
- : Ernesto Guevara de la Serna
- : Robert Redford
- : Paul Webster
- : Rebecca Yeldham
- : Julia Solomonoff
- : Eric Gautier
- : Beatriz de Benedetto
- : Javier Bannasser
- : Gustavo Santaolalla
- : Carlos Conti
Technical Information
- Color
- Spanish
Keywords
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Trailer
The Motorcycle diaries is a beautiful and tender insight into the life of Che Guevara, one of the most memorable and iconic figures of the 20th Century.-
The actors meet the film's challenges every step of the way. De la Serna finds the humor and the messy humanity in Alberto, who joined Ernesto in Cuba and makes an appearance, at age eighty-two, in the film's coda. The Mexican Bernal, far from the erotic romp of Y Tu Mama Tambien, gives a breakthrough performance, playing Ernesto like a gathering storm. In his published diaries, Che wrote, "I'll leave you now, with myself, the man I used to be." In this wild ride of a movie that is part epic poem and part political provocation, it's that man who holds the screen as a portent of history.
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone -
In some ways the movie resembles Easy Rider, a picture made when Che's posthumous reputation was at its height, but it's altogether more cheerful, optimistic, benevolent, and Ernesto and Alberto are far more likeable and idealistic than the fashionable heroes of Dennis Hopper's movie. They're a complementary pair. The thin, asthmatic Ernesto is naive, withdrawn, compulsively honest and can't tell a tango from a mambo. The robust, moustached Alberto is a silver-tongued, outgoing womaniser, who can charm the birds off the trees and into bed. They are united by a belief in progress and what science and medicine can do for their region. What they discover as they pass through the beautiful, challenging landscape are the near-intractable problems of a continent of such physical and social extremes
Philip French, The Guardian
