After the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959, three guerrilla fighters followed Che Guevara in his effort to spread the revolution beyond Cuba. Following their final battle in Bolivia and Che's execution in 1967, they undertook a perilous 2,400 km escape while pursued by 4,000 soldiers. Sixty years later, Che's last surviving comrades recount this untold story of endurance and loyalty through rare archive footage, animation, and exclusive interviews, revealing a forgotten chapter of Cold War history.​

Che Guevara’s legacy is known throughout the world, and some may also know how he died. Far fewer know the devoted guerrillas who fought beside him. Che Guevara: The Last Companions revisits one of the twentieth century’s most enduring myths from an unexpected angle. Rather than centering on Che as Latin America’s model revolutionary, Christophe Dimitri Réveille turns to the members of his guerrilla unit who escaped the Valley of Death after the failed 1967 campaign in Bolivia.

Réveille spent more than twenty years tracking down and recording the survivors, many of whom speak on camera for the first time. Combining rare archival footage, intimate interviews, and animated reconstructions of their journey through Bolivia’s mountains and jungles, the film vividly revives a little-known chapter of history. Premiered in the Special Screenings section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Che Guevara: The Last Companions​ is less a political portrait than a human story of friendship, survival, resolve, and memory. Strikingly, Réveille maintains a distance from the men’s revolutionary convictions. Yet, as the three survivors make clear, those beliefs were once their entire world—something for which they were prepared to give their lives. 

I wanted to tell the story of the men in the shadows: those who make—or fight—revolutions, and whose names never appear in history books. With all the testimonies I obtained, I felt a duty of remembrance—or more precisely, a work of memory. As if I had become the custodian of these “testamentary” testimonies, I felt that they should not remain buried in the silence of oblivion. One of the greatest challenges throughout these years of work was giving voice to all “sides” and confronting their perspectives in order to gain distance from each testimony. This is not the story of a single life, but of many: lives whose paths intersect—testimonies I selected because they allow me to speak about what happened, even though no one remembers it anymore. Or perhaps never knew it at all. It is by crossing the journeys of each person involved that I was able to revisit, as faithfully as possible, this decisive moment in the second half of the twentieth century.​

• ProducerJuan SOLANAS
• Cast Vincent LINDON

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