The Names of the Flowers

Carmel International Competition

  • Archive - Festival 36
  • Director: Bahman Tavoosi
  • Bolivia, Qatar, USA, Canada 2019
  • 79 minutes
  • Aymara, Spanish
  • Subtitles in Hebrew

As Bolivia stages the 50th anniversary of Ernesto "Che" Guevara’s death, Julia, an old countryside teacher from a remote village high on the Andes, is invited to share her memories with the world: Giving a bowl of soup to the captured guerrillero in her classroom, while he recited to her a poem about flowers a few hours before his death. Soon after, other women step forward, claiming the story of “the soup and the flower” as their own.

The fiction debut of filmmaker Bahman Tavoosi’s enlists the iconic figure of Che Guevara to deliver a powerful and multi-layered drama about identity, memory and survival.

Filmography: Dress Rehearsal for an Execution (doc, 2013).

 

Video talk with the director

 


  • Director Bahman Tavoosi
  • Production Aonan Yang, Andreas Mendritzki, Andrea D. Gutierrez, Gisela Savdie, Wendy Donnan, Abhay Shahin, Farrah Assadi Bolvarde
  • Script Bahman Tavoosi
  • Cinematography Nicolás Taborga
  • Editing Lucas Villegas
  • Festivals Tallinn Black Nights (Special Jury Prize)
  • Actors Jorge Hidalgo, Barbara Flores, José Luis Garibaldi Durán
  • Source Bahman Tavoosi, Montreal