HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE (1st America Film Festival, 1992)

With images of the miserable living conditions of the indigenous population of Bolivia and footage from the liberation struggle in Cuba, Santiago Alvarez assembles a tribute to Ernesto Che Guevara in response to the news of his death. The film was shown on the tenth anniversary of Guevara's death during a memorial rally in Havana's Revolution Square. HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE is not without reason one of Santiago Alvarez's most famous films. It is not so much a documentary as a documentary poem, a very personal yet universally valid examination of the legendary revolutionary, which Alvarez completed under the impression of Che's violent death. The Cuban filmmaker does a masterful job of relating the struggle against oppression in Cuba to later efforts to achieve something similar in other Latin American countries, as in this case in Bolivia. (Jennifer Stillman)