The Motorcycle Diaries

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) — watch online on iFILM, directed by Walter Salles. Based on the travel journals of a 23-year-old Argentine medical student who would later become Che Guevara. Gael García Bernal plays Ernesto; Rodrigo de la Serna plays his best friend Alberto Granado. Runtime 126 minutes.

January 1952: the two load a battered Norton 500 and leave Buenos Aires heading roughly north and west, with almost no money and no fixed itinerary. Over nine months they cover more than thirteen thousand kilometers — Andean villages, rubber plantations, a river leper colony on the Amazon. Every stop cracks open a different layer of a continent they'd only read about. The bike breaks down early and stays broken; most of the journey is hitchhiked, borrowed, or walked.

Salles isn't interested in the revolutionary myth. What he films is the moment just before it: a young man who arrives at one end of the trip certain about how things work, and leaves the other end not so sure. The film won an Academy Award for Best Original Song. Stream The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) online on iFILM.