‘Che Guevara: The Last Companions’ Cannes Review: A Guerrilla Escape Across Bolivia

This French documentary, years in the making, arrives in Cannes to revisit a story tied to Che Guevara’s ill-fated campaign and death in Bolivia. Told through the voices of the militants who survived that failed mission, the film opens with the Argentine guerrilla’s capture and execution before shifting—after a brisk overview of the Cuban Revolution and how each of them joined the movement led by Fidel Castro—to the story that follows: how a small group managed to escape Bolivia in what becomes a literal odyssey across the country, marked by constant movement and repeated clashes with local forces.

Drawing on interviews conducted decades ago, footage shot in the locations where events unfolded, and animated sequences that attempt to recreate the most tense moments, The Last Companions relies on a fairly traditional voiceover by Vincent Lindon. The narration begins by foregrounding the director’s own difficulty in bringing this largely unknown story to the screen. The opening leans into the most shocking element—the death of Guevara after the failed Bolivian campaign—but the film’s real focus lies in what came after.

Director Rémi Réveille circles back to the origins of the story, recounting the Cuban Revolution and how three of the six survivors—out of an original group of seventeen—joined the revolutionary ranks during the Sierra Maestra period, later accompanying Guevara in campaigns in Africa. The three central witnesses—Pombo, Urbano, and Benigno—anchor the film, which eventually concentrates on their arduous, near-miraculous escape across Bolivia, pursued by the army. The narrative also incorporates the presence of French intellectual Régis Debray, who was himself involved in the campaign.

Formally, the film leans on fairly basic and often repetitive devices, occasionally offset by more inventive stretches of traditional animation. It methodically traces a journey that zigzags across the country: encounters with battalions of hundreds of soldiers, hunger, cold, losses—not all of them made it out alive—and a grueling escape shaped in part by geopolitical maneuvering between several nations, including France, Chile, and the United States.

It’s the kind of story that almost begs for a fiction adaptation, with actors embodying the strange, intense, sometimes even darkly comic situations these men went through. Here, however, it is filtered through Lindon’s sober, almost academic narration and the testimonies of the three Cuban survivors, alongside accounts from various Bolivian participants on both sides of the conflict. The overall impression is that the film never quite capitalizes on the extraordinary material at its disposal, reshaping it instead into something that feels, at times, caught between a didactic tone and a kind of militant fable about “heroic revolutionary adventures”—a cinematic approach that seems to belong to another era.