Or perhaps the President of Iran, or his adviser, knows what happened to Comandante, Oliver Stone's first documentary about Fidel Castro that is reportedly a sympathetic portrayal of the Cuban leader, too sympathetic to be allowed to be released in theaters in the USA, and it was naturally rejected by HBO as well. Stone's second documentary, Looking for Fidel, focused on Cuba's human rights questions and included interviews with dissidents, which was of course shown on HBO.
Reading the New York Times review of Looking for Fidel below, I'd have to say turning down Oliver Stone was a correct decision, since "accusatory attention" (to use the Times reviewer's term) is likely to be the only kind of attention that media corporations would allow Stone to pay. (Maybe Fidel told Ahmadinejad about it.) And Looking for Fidel is a portrait of the _Cuban_ leader, for whom and whose revolution a significant number of leftists and even some liberals, including Stone himself, still have a soft spot. In contrast, most liberals and leftists in the USA regard Iran's government as the Great Satan, and nothing will change their minds about that.
The big American media are carefully censored and controlled (which fact is itself forgotten, as the media fail to mention* the fates of Stone's two documentaries about Fidel), to say nothing of self-censorship on the part of those who are fearful of being accused of engaging in so-called "apologetics" when it comes to saying anything about America's official enemies. Seriously, I have seen few balanced portrayals of the government of Iran that include _basic facts_ about it and the country it governs, let alone its achievements, in any American media, even the media on the Left, except in scholarly books and journals that few bother to read.
Recently, I read all New York Times articles about Iran during the Mossadegh administration, all the way up to the editorial published two days before the US-UK coup that toppled his government. The Times helped prepare the public for the coup, and it is doing the same again for "regime change" or war. Nothing has changed since then as far as the corporate media are concerned.
<http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html?_r=1&res=9C07E5D81F38F937A25757C0A9629C8B63> N.Y. TIMES REVIEW By ALESSANDRA STANLEY Published: April 14, 2004, Wednesday
There is a brief moment when the no pasaran rhetoric falls away, and Fidel Castro gives Oliver Stone a look that says everything about the Cuban dictator's senescent struggle to keep a foothold on the world stage.
Mr. Stone was asking Mr. Castro about a recent roundup of dissidents, a population that he insists does not exist. ''There is no braver people in the world and more capable of saying what they think,'' Mr. Castro fiercely tells Mr. Stone, the director of ''Looking for Fidel,'' a documentary on HBO tonight.
When Mr. Stone asks if a person who protested would be in trouble, Mr. Castro suddenly drops the virtuous indignation and looks at his guest through narrowed eyes. ''Hombre,'' he says, ''he is sentenced to 20 years in prison.'' And then he smiles, a crafty, wizened grin that signals -- far more than his labored breath, liver spots or thinning beard -- that he is in the final throes of his tenure as president-for-life.
Mr. Stone weaves interviews with Cuban dissidents and their families into his film, but it is Mr. Castro's ill-concealed fragility, more than his tyranny, that makes ''Looking for Fidel'' interesting. Castro's one-man war against the United States -- a foe that at this moment at least is gallingly distracted by a larger security threat -- is a familiar leitmotif in all Castro interviews. But in the twilight of his rule, he seems pathetically hungry for Mr. Stone's accusatory attention.
The timing for this film is not ideal. The American occupation of Iraq is all-consuming. A year ago Cuba was in the news because of a sudden rash of boat and airplane hijackings. The Bush administration over the last year has tightened bans on commerce and travel to Cuba, at least in part to appease Cuban-American voters in Florida. But despite or because of Fidel Castro, the rogue island no longer inspires the same passionate debate. There are few leftists remaining who bother to make the case for the purity of the Cuban revolution; even many Cuban exiles in Miami say they favor negotiations with Havana.
Only Mr. Castro has the energy -- or monomaniacal vanity -- to belie the obvious. And the way he marshals his fading strength and dictatorial powers to erect a Potemkin village of justice for the benefit of a Hollywood director would be poignant if it were not so grotesque. The two are well matched. Mr. Stone, the creator of ''Platoon,'' ''JFK'' and more recently, a self-aggrandizing HBO documentary about Israel and the Palestinians, may be the only filmmaker monomaniacal enough to believe that he can find something new or different to say about Fidel Castro.
This is not a documentary, per se, however: Mr. Stone's original three-day visit with Mr. Castro in 2002 resulted in a sweeping and sympathetic portrait, ''Commandante.'' (Mr. Castro muses about Richard M. Nixon and Mikhail S. Gorbachev and confides that his favorite movie stars are Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot.)
HBO had planned to show ''Commandante'' in the spring of 2003, but it was then that the Castro regime summarily executed three hijackers and jailed more than 70 political dissidents. HBO sent Mr. Stone back to Havana with ''follow-up'' questions that became ''Looking for Fidel.'' HBO took that and passed on ''Commandante,'' which has instead been making the round of international film festivals.
In ''Looking for Fidel,'' Mr. Stone asks about the three accused who were shot by a firing squad the day after a seven-day trial found them guilty of hijacking a Cuban ferry. Seated across a desk from Mr. Castro, who is dressed in his trademark military fatigues, Mr. Stone points out that it is unusual ''in the norms of international justice'' to execute prisoners so soon after a trial, without opportunity for appeal. ''That is true,'' Mr. Castro replies magnanimously. ''But this was virtually a situation of war.''
At another point he gathers around a conference table with another group of accused hijackers, their defense lawyers and the state prosecutors, so that Mr. Stone can see for himself how fair the Cuban justice system really is.
As Mr. Castro benignly looks on, Mr. Stone questions the prisoners through an interpreter without a trace of discomfort over the ludicrous stage craft. ''Are they being well treated in prison?'' he asks. ''Are they satisfied with their counsel?'' The answer, shockingly, is ''Si.''
Before ending the session, Mr. Castro tells the lawyers, ''I urge you to do your very best to reduce their sentences.'' (Three of the prisoners were sent away for life, and each of the other five got 30 years.)
Castro says that he is resigned to death. ''I am fully convinced that if I were to die tomorrow,'' he tells Mr. Stone, ''my influence would grow.'' Yet he takes Mr. Stone to the hospital and has an electrocardiogram examination. When a beaming doctor tells Mr. Castro that he has ''the heart rate of a 32-year-old,'' he springs up, buttons his shirt and says, ''I declare myself healthy.''
AMERICA UNDERCOVER Looking for Fidel HBO, tonight at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7 Central time
Directed by Oliver Stone; Alvaro Longoria and Fernando Sulichin, executive producers; Cristina Zumárraga, line producer; Rodrigo Prieto and Carlos Marcovich, directors of photography; Alex Marquez and Langdon Page, editors; music by Mastretta. For HBO: Nancy Abraham, supervising producer; Sheila Nevins, executive producer.
* BTW, Iran's government says that it might have made a different decision if an Iranian film maker had been given the same access to the POTUS that Stone sought regarding Ahmadinejad. Naturally, this part of the story doesn't get reported in the American media either in which US liberals and leftists, thinking they live in the Free World, still have touching trust.
<http://www.mehrnews.ir/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=511466> Tehran: 15:20 , 2007/07/02
Ahmadinejad's advisor rebuffs Stone's request calling him "part of the Great Satan"
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
On June 30, Ahmadinejad's art advisor Javad Shamaqdari said that a positive response from President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's office for Oliver Stone to make a documentary about him depends on a positive response on the part of President George Bush's office allowing an Iranian director to make a film about President Bush.
"If Mr. Oliver Stone can generate the conditions for an Iranian director to make a film on Bush, the likelihood that he will be allowed to make a documentary on the president of the Islamic Republic, Dr. Ahmadinejad, will increase," he noted.
On 7/5/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> I'll agree that "ignorance" and "stupidity" are constructed, and not
> the result of any biological deficiency among the American masses.
> But the patterns of ignorance are interesting, no? No idea what the
> hammer & sickle mean, no idea who the Chief Justice is, but quick to
> name the winner of American Idol.
Could it be that leftists themselves, as you can obviously see on LBO-talk, are busier talking about American idols than communist history or judicial history or anything else that is largely missing from the media but may be useful for the Americans to know? -- Yoshie