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 In
February 2002, acclaimed director Oliver Stone traveled
to Havana to meet with Cuban leader, Fidel Castro.
Over the course of three days, the two men engaged
in a series of frank conversations, which culminated,
months later, in the film Comandante.
In an interview with the London Times, Oliver Stone
noted that directing Comandante
- his first documentary film - has given him a welcome
break from movie-making.
“I was tired of movies because
they’re so big, expensive and artificial...and
also the digital aspect was so important. It was great
to take up the camera and feel it out and feel the
freedom.”
The project began when Fernando Sulichan, a Spanish
producer, offered Stone a chance to interview Fidel
Castro for Spanish TV.
The Cuban leader had agreed to the interview under
the condition that he could stop filming at any moment.
The production team taped over 30 hours of interviews
and Castro never exercised his power to stop the cameras.
 Over
the three days, Stone films Castro working at his
office, touring a medical school and a museum, and
follows him through the streets where he mingles freely
with Cuban citizens.
In an interview with the
BBC, Stone talked about his thoughts on Castro.
"Castro is isolated in the
hemisphere and for those reasons I admire him because
he's a fighter. He stood alone and in a sense he's
Don Quixote, the last revolutionary, tilting at this
windmill of keeping the island in a state of, I suppose,
egalitarianism where everyone would get the break,
everyone gets the education and everyone gets good
water."
The film paints Castro
as an engaging and intelligent leader, and looks beyond
the familiar beard, cigar and jungle fatigues. Stone
and Castro discuss pivotal moment in world history
such as President Kennedy's assassination, the Bay
of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis.
Originally produced for Spanish television, the European
and American film communities expressed interest in
the documentary. Comandante
premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January
2003 and HBO planned to air the film the following
May in the U.S.
In April 2003 several men armed with a pistol and
knives hijacked a Cuban ferry and 50 passengers and
ordered the captain to sail for the U.S. The ferry
was captured by Cuban authorities and a few days later
three of the hijackers were executed by firing squad,
on Castro's orders. 75 other dissidents were imprisoned.
In the controversy over
this news story Comandante
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. Castro agreed
as he was upset by the accusations and wanted to have
a chance to deny them. The resulting film, Looking
for Fidel is scheduled to run on HBO in April
2004.
Stone has also directed
a documentary, Persona Non Grata
about Yasser Arafat and the current state of the Palestinian
conflict.
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