COMANDANTE
Sunday March 28 at 10pm ET/PT
repeating Friday April 2 at 10pm ET

Is Comandante a bad film because it shows Fidel Castro, the old baseball star, effortlessly fielding Oliver Stone's softball questions, or a good film for the same reason?
Roger Ebert

Comandante is an intimate portrait of Fidel Castro and his beloved Cuba seen through the lens of acclaimed movie director Oliver Stone.  Edited from more than 30 hours of conversations, Comandante documents Stone's talks with the world's longest serving dictator. During three days of seemingly candid and revealing discussion, Castro speaks about his youth, his rise to power, his children, liaisons with women, theology, philosophy, Ernest Hemingway, and how he sees the present state of his country.

While there is no question that Castro is an agile and sometimes elusive subject, Oliver Stone creates an environment in which the audience gets to see and hear a side of Castro rarely seen on televison.  Castro was allowed the right to say "cut" at any time, but according to information we're provided with at the beginning of the documentary, this was something he never did.  Was Stone charmed and seduced by the eloquent dictator as some critics have charged, missing the opportunity to confront him with tough questions about his regime… or as critic Roger Ebert wrote when the documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2003…. did he create " a phenomenon", where we get to see Castro "unplugged".  Does it both fascinate and make audiences uncomfortable because it presents a dictator who has jailed and executed his opponents as human?

The documentary was originally scheduled to premier on HBO last spring but was pulled shortly after Castro not only jailed 75 dissidents, but executed 3 men who had attempted to hijack a ferry.  Stone has since returned to Havana and made a sequel which deals more critically with the issue of dissidents in Cuba called 'Looking for Fidel'.  It will be released later this year.  CBC Newsworld is trying to acquire that documentary as well.

Comandante ultimately provides an illuminating tête-à-tête, that offers insights into Fidel Castro and how he has survived more than four decades as a dictator and persistent antagonist to the United States.

Comandante is produced and directed by Oliver Stone for MediaProducción, Pentagrama Films and Morena Films in Spain.