South of the Boarder (Oliver Stone, 2009): USA

Reviewed by Jonas Pedersen Hardebrant. Viewed at Lobero Theatre at Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

South of the Boarder is the third film in the series about Latin and South America that award winning director Oliver Stone has made, with the vision of opening our eyes towards what media describes as dictatorships, but reality shows something else. The first two movies digs deeper into the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro’s life where Stone asks get the closest and most eye-opening interview ever made with Castro, who is not very fund of doing openhearted interviews with Westerners.
In South of the boarder we are facing another of the so-called “dictators” that rule a nation south of the American boarder, Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.

Stone who has openly been very critical against the Bush administration shows us another side of the coin than what we see in our everyday media. Shocking evidence is revealed about how the American media has withheld and even manipulated the facts to make Chavez look like a horrible dictator with extremist followers, where as the truth is that Chavez has the record in being reelected as president in elections approved by the voting commission.

We follow Stone on his journey around Latin and South America while talking to presidents and other highly acknowledged representatives. The main point is to talk about how their countries are being treated by the United States and their relation to Chavez and the other presidents in the area. All of them agree on one thing, and that is that Chavez is falsely being accused of being a tyrant, but the true facts are that he has helped his fellow presidents to if not getting rid of, but at least decreasing their debt to the IMF (International Monetary Fund). The debt to the IMF is seen as the Achilles heel to become individual and independent for many of the Latin and South American countries. Ironically, IMF is run by America to hold a steady grip on these countries.

This documentary is by far one of the most interesting and revealing I have ever seen, not only does it open your eyes, it shocks, it provokes and it makes you laugh.  The way that it is done proves how much research and hard work that Stone put down before he even started to do interviews. Obviously there is a certain angling and we might not get all the true facts but it is enjoyable and sometimes even ridiculously funny how wrong you can be, just by looking through the lens of the Media. Particularly it is interesting to listen when the other presidents, like Raul Castro (Cuba), Evo Morales (Boliva) and Nestor and Cristina Kirchner (Argentina),   talk about Chavez and the way they have been treated by the Bush administration themselves.

At the Q&A afterwards Stone reveals that he wants to make documentaries shocking and provocative but still with a certain objectivity. In this particular case though, it was hard because all the evidence pointed at how wrong Chavez has been mirrored in the media. Chavez reduced the poverty by half in  his country, he minimized the extreme poverty rate and increased the economy and more people have jobs than ever. So the question Stone asks is how Chavez, as a beloved president can be so hated among the American government. Well the obvious answer is that countries and presidents needs to follow Americas pipe or they will be pictured as Chavez, the hero in his country, the devil in America.