Che Guevara: The Last Companions contains the typical elements one sees in documentaries – animation, archive footage, and interviews. As I write this, credit is due for the animators in capturing the emotions of Guevara’s fellow fighters. Those segments show them being dejected after hearing about their leader’s death and Bolivian soldiers capturing another fighter. But despite that and Frenchman Regis Debray’s eventual surrender, they get help from locals and head toward Chile.

This also has the same two auras that documentaries usually have – bittersweet and insightful, just like its subject. There are, thankfully, slivers of levity here through its French connection as Debray recounts Bolivian police interviewing him. As a good revolutionary, he denounces the man who fights alongside him until they show him photos. He has no choice but to admit his involvement with Guevara, Last Companions reinforcing the dangers of making that admission.

Che Guevara: The Last Companions reminds its viewers, with good reason, the difficulties that come with revolutionary fighting. It does this with interviews of the other fighters remembering how they have to negotiate with the locals. Scenes in the documentary’s first half recounts them being unable to connect with Bolivians so they tread carefully. Other locals, though, remember how soldiers plunder their resources which make them support the fighters however they can.

The Bolivian Army may outnumber the fighters but Che Guevara: The Last Companions shows those fighters last hurrahs. The documentary revisits the places where the fighters exercised their authority, still the same small villages as before. There’s something inherently contradictory about history erupting in places that seem calmer than they were during decades prior. Still, some of Guevara’s compatriots were alive during the documentary’s production and keeping the fight for equality alive.