The Motorcycle Diaries

The Motorcycle Diaries (Diarios de motocicleta) a 2004 film based on the books The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Guevara and With Che Through Latin America by Alberto Granado. It chronicles the journey of a two friends who plan to learn about the continent around them, their discovery is deepened as the two question the progress society celebrates.

Directed by Walter Salles. Written by Ernesto Guevara and Alberto Granado.

Starring: Gael García Bernal, Rodrigo De la Serna, and Mía Maestro.

Let the world change you... and you can change the world

Ernesto 'Ché' Guevara

• [narration] This isn’t a tale of heroics, nor is it merely some kind of ‘cynical account’; it isn’t meant to be, at least. It’s simply two lives running parallel for a while, with common aspirations and similar dreams.
• [voiceover]
  We look like outlaws inspiring admiration everywhere we go. We’ve left civilization behind and we are much closer to the land.
• A revolution without guns? It would never work.
• The deeper we go into the Andes the more indigenous people we encounter, who are homeless in their own land. All across our own land.
• What we had in common – our restlessness, our impassioned spirits, and a love for the open road.
• How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?
• You gotta fight for every breath and tell death to go to hell.
• (To Alberto): Are you talking to the motorcycle again?
• What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two; melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.
• Even though we are too insignificant to be spokesmen for such a noble cause, we believe, and this journey has only confirmed this belief, that the division of American into unstable and illusory nations is a complete fiction. We are one single mestizo race from Mexico to the Magellan Straits. And so, in an attempt to free ourselves from narrow minded provincialism, I propose a toast to Peru and to a united America.
• Wandering around our America has changed me more than I thought. I am not me any more. At least I'm not the same me I was.
• Me, I'm not the same me, at least not the same spiritual me.

Book

• I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I will be with the people ~ Ernesto 'Ché' Guevara
• "What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two; melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land" ~ Ernesto 'Ché' Guevara
• All of them, all those who can’t adapt – you and I, for instance – will die cursing the power which they helped bring about with often enormous sacrifices. Revolution is impersonal, so it will take their lives and even use their memory as an example or as an instrument to control the young people coming after them…you will die with your fist clenched and your jaw tense, the perfect manifestation of hatred and struggle, because you aren’t a symbol (some inanimate example), you are an authentic member of the society to be destroyed; the spirit of the beehive speaks through your mouth and moves through your actions. You are as useful as I am, but you don’t realize how useful your contribution is to the society that sacrifices you. ~ Ernesto 'Ché' Guevara
• It is at times like this, when a doctor is conscious of his complete powerlessness, that he longs for change: a change to prevent the injustice of a system in which only a month ago this poor woman was still earning her living as a waitress, wheezing and panting but facing life with dignity. In circumstances like this, individuals in poor families who can’t pay their way become surrounded by an atmosphere of barely disguised acrimony; they stop being father, mother, sister or brother and become a purely negative factor in the struggle for life and, consequently, a source of bitterness for the healthy members of the community who resent their illness as if it were a personal insult to those who have to support them. ~ Ernesto 'Ché' Guevara
• At night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look out over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of his own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only very faintly – not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice. ~ Ernesto 'Ché' Guevara
• The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have conserved their racial purity by a lack of affinity with washing, have seen their patch invaded by a different kind of slave: The Portuguese.
  • The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey around South America, trans. Ann Wright, Verso, London and New York, (1995) p. 148
• [T]he black is indolent and fanciful, he spends his money on frivolity and drink; the European comes from a tradition of working and saving which follows him to this corner of America and drives him to get ahead, even independently of his own individual aspirations.
  • The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey around South America, trans. Ann Wright, Verso, London and New York, (1995) pp. 148-149

[Note]: Film is based on the books The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Guevara and With Che Through Latin America by Alberto Granado.

Cast

Gael García Bernal – Ernesto 'Ché' Guevara de la Serna

Rodrigo De la Serna – Alberto Granado

Mía Maestro – Chichina Ferreyra

Mercedes Morán – Celia de la Serna

External links

• The Motorcycle Diaries on IMDb.
• The Motorcycle Diaries at Rotten Tomatoes.
• The Official The Motorcycle Diaries Site