El día que me quieras (1997) watch online HD

There may be some slight bias here, just to say right up front, as Leandro Katz was for a good couple of years (that was when I started taking film classes until he up and retired/quit right before I finished my BA in Film) was one of the professors I most admired, and who helped guide me along and become a better writer and director. That said, when I went to one of his two nights of screenings of works at the Anthology Film Archives, I wasn't sure what to expect (I'd only seen one short of his when I was in school called 'The Visit', a short-film masterpiece I recommend to... anyone who can track it down at WPU, haha).

We got three shorts, the first a silent one-long-take 8mm film tracking along people at a train station with mathematically timed freeze-frames, a 30 minute short doc called 'Paradox' about a banana plantation juxtaposed with statues of ancient ruins in Guatemala. And finally, this film, 'The Day You Love Me', which is one of the best short docs I've ever seen, all concerning a photograph. Katz, like Errol Morris with S.O.P., is inquiring not just about what's in the photograph(s) of this controversial moment in time after Che Guevara was executed and let open for photographers and military personell to look over (though like any good mystery there is that), but about inquiry itself, and what we can learn about ourselves looking at the photograph, and about mystery and so on. It's a powerful, short document (apparently followed up by 'Exhumacion' a film Katz made in 2007 I haven't seen, about Che's body after being missing for 30 years being discovered in Bolivia and taken back to Cuba).

"El dia que me quieras" looks at the iconic photograph of the executed revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, taken by Bolivian photographer Freddy Alborta. The film includes interviews with Alborta, intercut with some arresting and sometimes surreal scenes from a Bolivian village festival.

"El dia" is an interesting meditation on the photograph and the circumstances under which it was taken, but the material may be too slight to justify a thirty-minute documentary. The scenes shot in the village, while undeniably beautiful, feel like padding.

The film doesn't offer any major revelations to students of either Guevara or photography, but it's an interesting and attractive piece nonetheless. It's just a pity that the director didn't have slightly more to show for his thirty minutes.