Oliver Stone - Documentaries

Documentaries

Stone made 3 documentaries on Fidel Castro: Comandante (2003), Looking for Fidel, and Castro in Winter (2012). He made Persona Non Grata, a documentary on Israeli-Palestinian relations, interviewing several notable figures of Israel, including Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Shimon Peres, as well as Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization. (See also Controversy, below.)

In 2009, Stone completed a feature length documentary, South of the Border about the rise of progressive, leftist governments in Latin America, featuring 7 presidents: Hugo Chavez of Venezuala, Bolivia's Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Correa, Cuba’s Raul Castro, the Kirchners of Argentina, Brazil’s Lula da Silva, and Paraguay’s Lugo (all democratically elected and all holding negative views of U.S. manipulations in South America). Stone hoped the film would get the Western world to rethink socialist policies in South America, particularly as it was being applied by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Chavez joined Stone for the premiere of the documentary at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2009. Stone defended his decision not to interview Chavez’s opponents, stating that oppositional statements and TV clips were scattered through the documentary and that the documentary was an attempt to right a balance of heavily negative coverage. He praised Chavez as a leader of a movement for social transformation in Latin America (The Bolivarian Revolution), along with the six other Presidents in the film. The documentary was also released in several cities in the United States and Europe in the summer of 2010.