Everyone knows the name Che Guevara, but not the names of the 17 guerrillas who fought alongside him when he was captured in Bolivia on October 8, 1967, and executed the following day. Eleven fighters were killed in the confrontation with the Bolivian army. The remaining six, pursued by thousands of soldiers, embarked on a seemingly impossible escape from Bolivia.
Twenty years ago, filmmaker Christophe Dimitri Réveille became fascinated by these guerrillas and their extraordinary escape story. In reconstructing the events, he interweaves interviews with archival footage and animation. Three surviving guerrillas talk about what motivated them to join Guevara, reasons that were by no means always ideological. The film also features testimony from military personnel involved in the manhunt, a CIA agent, and the French philosopher and journalist Régis Debray, who was in Bolivia at the time and sympathized with Guevara.
In the end, Cuba did not prove to be a paradise for all the guerrillas: one of them fled again in 1995, this time escaping Fidel Castro’s regime for France.
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