Che: Part One

Che: Part One (2008) is Steven Soderbergh's historical drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. It is the first half of a two-film portrait of how an Argentine doctor named Ernesto Guevara became Che.

The story opens in the mid-1950s, when Guevara meets Fidel Castro and joins the band of fighters who will land on Cuba to topple Fulgencio Batista. What follows are years in the Sierra Maestra mountains: fevers, too few men, too little ammunition, and a tiny guerrilla force slowly hardening into a real army. Soderbergh cuts this jungle campaign against black-and-white footage from 1964, where a suited Che addresses the United Nations in New York. Benicio del Toro plays Guevara, a performance that won him the best actor prize at Cannes.

Shot in Spanish on RED digital cameras, the film skips the usual biopic crutches, no childhood scenes, no voiceover spelling out the man. The result is less a poster or a saint's tale than a dry record of how a revolution actually gets made, day by day, march by march. Stream Che: Part One (2008) online on iFILM.