The story of this film is regarding two young men’s exciting and hazardous road trip across Latin America, which changes their life with self-discovery. The Motorcycle Diaries achieved a definite apolitical personality due to the attractiveness of the South American land and of Gael Garcia Bernals.
The two friends Guevara and Alberto Granado start a journey with a leaky motorcycle from Buenos Aires desiring to go around the continent on it. They complete their journey more by foot, hitchhiking, and raft rather than by motorcycle, but they achieve a precious experience about the land and the people of Latin America, which affects them deeply. They spent several weeks in a Peruvian leper colony working as volunteers. These weeks at the leper colony constitute the dramatic core of the movie (Berman). Nuns oppressed the colony by maintaining an unkind social ladder between staff and patients, who reject to give food to people out of mass.
Young Che fights against these strictures. In a night Guevara makes his symbolic journey crossing the river by swim that divides the two communities of the leper colony not considering his asthma and staying in a leper shack instead of doctors’ cabin. After staying few days in the leper colony at the end making a birthday toast he ensures his nascent egalitarian and anti-authority impulses, as his first political speech. The movie ends with an appearance of actual 82-year-old Alberto Granado and pictures of real journey and a notification of Che Guevara’s CIA-assisted execution in 1967 in the Bolivian jungle.
This film is influential for Latin American due to the visualization enormous geographical variety, expanse, and beauty of Argentina, Chile, Peru, Columbia, and Venezuela. This movie may make a person a fan of Guevara informing the actual life pattern of him as a Latin American and as an egalitarian politician.