Argentinean filmmaker to screen Ché Guevara documentary at Bates

Argentinean filmmaker Leandro Katz shows his film “El Día Que Me Quieras” (The Day You’ll Love Me), a deconstruction of the infamous photographs taken of the slain revolutionary Ché Guevara, at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 24, in Room 105 of the Olin Arts Center, Bates College. A discussion with Katz follows the film and the public is invited to attend free of charge.

A non-narrative film investigating death and the power of photography, “El Día Que Me Quieras” is a meditation on the last pictures of Ernesto Ché Guevara, taken in 1967 as he lay dead on a table surrounded by his captors in Bolivia. Not a political documentary in the traditional sense, the film alternates between evocation and straight reportage, centering on an interview with the Bolivian photographer Freddy Alborta, who made the famous image. Suffused with a sense of mystery, “El Día Que Me Quieras” is about our assimilation of history.

“Visually exquisite and deeply moving…Leandro Katz’s film is at once an elegy to the passing of the age of revolution in Latin America and an investigation into the history and mythos surrounding the infamous photograph of the beatific corpse of its central icon: Ché Guevara,” wrote Jeffrey Skoller in the journal AfterImage.

The film had its world premiere at the Festival del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de La Habana, where it won the International Jury’s Coral Prize. It has also won the “Best Documentary” prize in the Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia, Chile. The film has been included in festivals in the Holland, Italy, Spain, Norway, Germany, Germany and France. It was part of the Visible Evidence Conference at San Francisco State University and also the New Documentaries Series at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. For more information, call the film’s sponsor, the Bates College Multicultural Center, at 207-786-8215.