Chavez Film: Oliver Stone and Tariq Ali: brothers in arms

international | anti-capitalism | other press Wednesday July 28, 2010 14:59 by pat c

Tariq Ali has written the commentary for Oliver Stones new documentary about Hugo Chavez. Here he writes on how the film was made. Full story at link.

Almost a year and a half ago I received a phone call from Paraguay. It was Oliver Stone. He had been reading Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope, my collection of essays on the changing politics of Latin America, and asked if I was familiar with his work. I was, especially the political films in which he challenged the fraudulent accounts of the Vietnam war that had gained currency during the B-movie years of Reagan's presidency.

It does not set out to be an analytical, distanced, cold-blooded view of leaders desperate to free themselves from the stranglehold of the Big Brother up north. The film is sympathetic to their cause, which is essentially a cry for freedom, the interviews with the seven elected presidents forming its spinal cord. Chávez is given centre stage, because he was the pioneering leader of the radical social-democratic experiments currently underway in the continent, and his country has large oil reserves. "If the film convinces people that Chávez is a democratically elected president and not the evil dictator depicted in much of the western media," Stone said, "we will have achieved our purpose."