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The brutal petrol trade between Venezuela and Colombia in 2012 is the backdrop to Andrés Baiz’s starry if slow-paced tale of brothers navigating the future

It’s called the “caravan of death” – cars speeding, Mad Max-style, across the desert on the border between Colombia and Venezuela, loaded up with jerry cans of petrol. Colombian film-maker Andrés Baiz, who previously worked on episodes of Netflix’s Narcos, has directed this crime saga inspired by the real-life “pimpineros”, smugglers who exploited dirt-cheap petrol during the presidency of Hugo Chávez. But strangely, this film keeps to the speed limit; it’s like Formula One with enhanced health and safety, slow-paced and a little low on adrenaline.

The year is 2012, when sixpence bought a gallon of petrol in oil-rich Venezuela, leading to a boom in cross-border smuggling to Colombia. A trio of brothers, the Estradas, have been muscled out of the smuggling business...

Edmundo González, the Venezuelan opposition candidate who has been recognized by multiple nations as the rightful winner of the country’s contested July election, hasn’t been seen in weeks. Amid a wave of arrests and violent repression against members and supporters of the opposition, González has gone into hiding. In his absence, María Corina Machado, a former industrial engineer who served as a member of Venezuela’s National Assembly, has become the driving figure of a movement that seeks to electorally oust President Nicolás Maduro after more than a decade in power.

Last month, Danny Ocean released a new EP entitled venequia. Taking its name from a slang term for what Venezuela became after the effects of populist president Hugo Chávez’s government, Ocean’s project deals head-on with Venezuela’s reality. Here, the lovelorn popetón tracks and ballads that made Ocean one of his country’s most prominent musicians are sung here to Venezuela itself.

The cover features a small section of Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez’s “Cromointerferencia de color aditivo”, an iconic installation that lines the walls and floors of Maiquetía “Simon Bolívar” International Airport.

The 1986 war drama "Platoon" was Oliver Stone's fourth film as a director, but it proved to be his breakout in the public consciousness. Before 1986, Stone helmed two horror movies and a biopic of war photographer Richard Boyle ("Salvador"), but "Platoon" put him on the map. It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and won four, including Best Picture and Best Director. Stone immediately emerged as an enfent terrible, ready to interrogate and criticize previously romanticized American institutions. He also became wildly ambitious, seemingly possessing the temerity to assume his films would change the way the public thinks. In some cases, he was right. 

Stone wore his politics on his sleeve, and often spoke about how much he hated the American right wing. Two of his films are deeply critical biopics of Republican presidents, and several of his more recent documentaries analyze politicians in power. He has turned his lens on Vladimir Putin,...

Oliver Stone has always had one eye pointed south of the U.S. border.

It began with his phenomenal script for Brian De Palma’s Scarface, which transformed the famous Chicago gangster into a hardened Cuban refugee. After that, Stone directed the photojournalist saga Salvador, about the deadly civil war that gripped El Salvador in the 1980s. And later on he made a handful of documentaries about Latin American leaders, two of them featuring Fidel Castro and another one including such leftist figureheads as Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales.

Stone’s fascination with the dirty politics and violent class struggles of the southern hemisphere seems to perfectly align with the dramatic twists and nonstop conspiracies present in much of his other fictional work, from J.F.K. to Nixon to W to Snowden. In the director’s world, which he argues is ours as well, leaders are either corruptible or taken down by the corrupt,...

Oliver Stone is unveiling his long-awaited documentary “Lula” at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

Stone filmed the documentary about thrice-elected Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva that encompasses the ruler’s incarceration between 2018 and 2019 and his return to power. Stone was in production on the feature in 2021 during which time Lula da Silva contracted Covid while filming in Cuba.

“Lula” is the latest addition to the star-studded Cannes lineup, which also includes new films from Paul Schrader, Francis Ford Coppola, Yorgos Lanthimos, Andrea Arnold, David Cronenberg, Ali Abbasi, Sean Baker, Jia Zhangke, and Paolo Sorrentino.

Stone teased “Lula” to Jacobin earlier this year, saying that the film would be released “hopefully before the end of the year.”

“As you know, I had him in the other films with Hugo Chávez. And of course, he’s gotten a very dramatic story, with his going to jail after his second term. Now...

Yet another one of Donald Trump’s former lawyers flipped on him this week, as Sidney Powell pleaded guilty to helping Trump attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and agreed to testify against him as needed. Of course, Seth Meyers isn’t totally convinced her testimony won’t be completely “insane.”

Powell pleaded guilty Thursday to six counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties, admitting she assisted local GOP officials in illegally breaking into voting systems in Coffee County, Georgia in 2020 in an attempt to help Trump overturn the election by “proving” it was rigged. The lesser charges were reduced from felonies as part of the deal.

Powell is perhaps most remembered though for her promise to “release the Kraken” on “big tech” companies and the media for their purported interference in the election. So, with that in mind, Meyers expects any evidence she provides in...

Sidney Powell was the wildest of Maga diehards — someone who swore long past the bitter end that Donald Trump won by a landslide in 2020, and insinuated that a long-dead Venezuelan dictator helped hatch a plot that flipped votes away from her guy. That’s why the former president and much of his inner circle didn’t think the conspiracy-addled lawyer would ever cooperate with prosecutors seeking to convict the ex-president. “Crazy as she was, she really believed what she was pushing,” a lawyer close to the former president says.

Her...

Jacobin Magazine documentary follows leftist economist Andres Arauz at 2021 polls.

Buffalo 8 has acquired North American rights to Héctor Muniente’s documentary The Ecuadorian Candidate which shot during the 2021 Ecuador election.

The Jacobin Magazine documentary follows the story of Leftist economist Andres Arauz as he bids to become the next president of Ecuador.

Arauz was backed by Rafael Correa, the former president who launched Ecuador’s Leftist movement, governed the South American country from 2007 to 2017, and was an ally of Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.

Arauz contested the election against the conservative banker Guillermo Lasso, who was...

Jacobin Magazine documentary follows leftist economist Andres Arauz at 2021 polls.

Buffalo8 has acquired North American rights to Héctor Muniente’s documentary The Ecuadorian Candidate which shot during the 2021 Ecuador election.

The Jacobin Magazine documentary follows the story of Leftist economist Andres Arauz as he bids to become the next president of Ecuador.

Arauz was backed by Rafael Correa, the former president who launched Ecuador’s Leftist movement, governed the South American country from 2007 to 2017, and was an ally of Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.

Arauz contested the election against the conservative banker Guillermo Lasso, who was...

Harry Belafonte, the pioneering Calypso singer, actor, and civil rights leader, has died at the age of 96.

According to The New York Times, Belafonte passed away on Tuesday from congestive heart failure.

Born on March 1st, 1927 in Harlem, New York to Jamaican-American parents, Harold Bellanfanti, Jr. served in the Navy in World War II before becoming enamored with the stage while attending shows at the American Negro Theater with close friend Sidney Poitier. Eventually, he began performing at the venue after taking acting classes at The New School and won a Tony Award for the 1953 musical revue John Murray Anderson’s Almanac.

Belafonte began his musical career performing in nightclubs as a way to afford his acting classes. In 1953, he signed a recording contract with RCA Victor and released his debut single, “Matilda,” ahead of his breakthrough album Calypso. The 1956 LP topped the Billboard album chart for 31 weeks and spawned...

Barbara Walters, the legendary Emmy-award winning broadcast journalism pioneer and co-creator of “The View”, has died. She was 93 years old.

ABC News confirmed the news on Friday. No cause of death was given. Disney CEO Bob Iger tweeted that Walters died on Friday evening at her home in New York.

Throughout her more than 50-year career, Walter became a staple in broadcasting, helming the “Today” show ABC News, “20/20”, “The View”, and her annual “Most Fascinating People” special, while simultaneously paving the way for other female journalists.

Making a name in an industry dominated by men became an unspoken routine for Walters who began working for “20/20” in 1978. Joining the news magazine reunited Walters with her former “Today” co-host, Hugh Downs, and solidified what became her legacy.

Walters was born on September 25, 1929 in Boston, Massachusetts. She grew up in Boston, Miami and New York, the latter of which is where she launched...

Pedro Aldana began riding motorcycles as a baby. His father would sit him on his lap and they’d cruise through the barrio of Propatria in Caracas together. When he got older, he began careening around on BMX bikes, learning to do wheelies through the chaotic and near-vertical hills of the neighborhood. Soon, he was “borrowing” his dad’s motorcycle at night, and his constant high-speed antics earned him a nickname around town: Pedro Locura. “Crazy Pedro.” Now, when he speeds through Caracas on his teal Yamaha, you can hear people screaming “Pedro Locura!

Surprisingly, Nuclear is not one of Oliver Stone’s “devil’s advocate” documentaries, the spate of films he started making in the early 2000s that seemed to troll liberals everywhere by spending time with notorious human-rights abusers such as Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin. In the real world right now, nuclear power is about as toxic as those three men put together, but this intelligent and surprising film is an investigation into how that PR damage came about, which makes it arguably more of a piece with his famous conspiracy thriller JFK than any of those. At nearly two hours, it’s a hard watch, being dominated by Stone’s dense, monotonous voice-over and featuring scientists with next to no screen presence (this explains a lot about Adam McKay’s decision to shoot Don’t Look Up with A-listers). Nevertheless, it puts forward a lot of unexpected proposals about nuclear energy,...

Jared Kushner knew his father-in-law and boss Donald Trump had lost to Joe Biden. But that didn’t stop Kushner from trying to help his wife’s dad cling to power.

Nowadays, as Kushner seeks investments for his firm and attempts to launder his image, the former senior White House aide would like everyone in the public and the press to believe he had nothing to do with the January 6 insurrection or Team Trump’s most scandalous efforts to overthrow the American democratic order. However, there is one problem: Kushner...

Dominion Voting Systems has filed defamation lawsuits against Newsmax, One America News Network and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne over the advancement of conspiracy theories that company had a role in rigging the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Each lawsuit seeks more than $1.6 billion in damages.

The Newsmax lawsuit was filed in the Superior Court of Delaware, and the claims against One America parent Herring Networks and Byrne were filed in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia. Also named in the One America complaint were owners Robert Herring and Charles Herring and One America personalities Chanel Rion and Christina Bobb.

“During and after the November 2020 election, Oan saw a business opportunity,” the company said in the Oan complaint (read it here). “Spurred by a quest for profits and viewers, Oan — a competitor to media giant Fox — engaged in a race to the bottom with Fox and other...

“Citizen Penn” opens in Hollywood in 2019, with Jamie Foxx, in high spirits, introducing Sean Penn at a benefit gala for Haiti. It doesn’t take long for the spirits to come crashing down to earth, as Penn, founder and spokesman of the J/P Relief Organization, hits the audience with a Debbie Downer buzzkill. The Russians, he says, are testing hypersonic nuclear weapons; populist demagogues are turning the world economy into a game; and climatologists, warns Penn, give us 11 years before “global catastrophic failure.” He adds, “Lies, greed, rage, sexism, and racism threaten to induce further violence in our own streets.” But then, just as you’re getting ready to see people streaming toward the exits, something funny happens. Penn says that it’s the cardinal rule of fund-raising not to bum out the crowd. He then spreads his hands and grins, acknowledging that’s what he just did.

That...

This documentary about Sean Penn’s response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti may be self-congratulatory, but the actor has had an undeniable impact

Actor, director, screenwriter and now novelist Sean Penn has had some mixed notices for his non-showbiz activities and his dramatic interventions in various international situations – including his defiant declaration of faith in the late Hugo Chávez and his successor as Venezuelan president, the now-notorious Nicolás Maduro. And the naysayers and the eye-rollers may not be entirely mollified by this documentary about Sean Penn’s charity work in Haiti, which does come across in some ways as a 93-minute self-administered high-five.

It begins with a carefully curated montage of TV news footage tacitly admitting what a paparazzo-punching brat he once was – but there is no clip of his puppet appearance in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s comedy Team America: World Police as an archetypal whiny liberal. Well,...

Washington — The legal blitz by voting-machine companies who have been the target of right-wing conspiracies just took another big step forward. On Thursday, the company Smartmatic sued Fox News and some of its biggest names alleging defamation and asking for a staggering $2.7 billion in damages.

The 285-page complaint names Fox Corporation, Fox News Network, as well as Fox hosts Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro, along with the pro-Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell who have both made frequent appearances on Fox. The complaint filed by Smartmatic alleges...

“Morichales,” an experimental mocumentary about a geographer and explorer working in Venezuela’s Guyana, won the recent 35th Mar del Plata Festival work in progress showcase. “Morichales” is produced by Felipe Guerrero and Chris Gude at Colombia’s Mutokino (“Los Conductos”).

A jury including producers Montse Triola, Zsuzsanna Kiràly and Sandra Gómez hailed Gude “for making a film that documents the fictitious figure of a miner and his tragic fate as a victim of the system and executioner of the planet.”

Director Chris Gude explained his protagonist, saying that “being both victim and executioner is a paradox, an existential trap that almost all human beings must confront.”

With “Morichales,” Gude closes a trilogy which began with 2013’s “Mambo Cool,” depicting the underworld of cocaine micro-trafficking and other drugs on the streets of Medellín, and continued with “Mariana,” (2017) about gasoline and whisky, hot-ticket contraband commodities in the frontier deserts between Colombia and Venezuela.

As the title of this documentary from Maxx Caicedo and Nelson G Navarrete suggests, the pair get down to street level to consider the mix of politics and protest currently affecting Venezuelan society. In contrast to the single community consideration of Once Upon A Time In Venezuela - which is also screening as part of Doc NYC - here the directors are trying to give a more panoramic view of the issues, offering an array of voices, from medics to opposition leaders and blue collar workers.

A potted history of recent Venezuelan politics is stitched through the film - although, like much here, it could do with a tighter focus - but it basically emphasises the economic crisis in the country that has worsened under Hugo Chávez's successor Nicolás Maduro, exacerbated by his refusal to acknowledge the deep problems his country faces or to accept international aid. This crisis is at the.

Regardless of the 2020 Presidential Election (ostensibly) coming to an end this week, it’s surely going to be a relief for many Americans that one of the most tumultuous campaign cycles in the history of the United States will be over. That includes David Letterman, who recently gave a wide-ranging interview to Vulture, digging into not only the election but also his popular new talk show on Netflix, “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction,” which recently unveiled its second season. During the conversation, Letterman was asked to recall what he believed the nadir of Donald Trump’s presidency has been thus far.

“Well, I’ll tell you when it really began was when he declared that the press was the enemy of the people,” referring to comments from Trump that originated in early 2017 on Twitter, soon after his inauguration and as just one of his many rampages upon “fake news.

What if it turned out your favorite song had been written by the CIA? That’s exactly what a new podcast aims to determine.

In 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, West German band the Scorpions released their prescient ballad “Wind of Change.” With earnest lyrics about togetherness and the “children of tomorrow,” the song sounds like an anthem to the end of the Cold War. But, according to The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe, there’s reason to believe the hit ballad could have been a...

The specialty box office space has quickly adapted to the changing film landscape as many are shifting to virtual theatrical openings. Many indie and arthouse titles do day and date releases and are VOD-only so the transition, for the most part, is familiar territory for many distributors and production companies.

Written and directed by Jonathan Jakubowicz, Resistance tells the true story of a group of Girls and Boy Scouts that created a network that went on to save nearly 10,000 orphans whose parents had been killed by the Nazis in the World War II. Jesse Eisenberg takes the lead role as an aspiring Jewish actor who has a need to help the children which leads him to the world of pantomime. As a result, he would become the iconic French mime Marcel Marceau.

More from DeadlineKino Marquee Virtual Arthouse Program Expands To 150 Cinemas With Alamo Drafthouse & Laemmle In Streaming Cannes Winner 'Bacurau'Searchlight,...

The Party Films Sales, the newly launched Paris-based film company, is making its market debut at the Efm with several acquisitions, including Javier Polo’s “The Mystery of the Pink Flamingos” and Jim Rakete’s “Now.”

The company brings together the international sales units of two banners, Jour2Fête, a French distribution company, and Doc & Film Intl., a world sales company that was recently acquired by Jour2Fete following the exit of its CEO Daniela Elstner, who is now UniFrance’s managing director.

“The Mystery of the Pink Flamingos” and “Now” are being delivered in two different versions, a feature-length one aimed at theatrical distributors, and a 52-minute format for TV channels. Samuel Blanc, co-head of international sales at The Party Films Sales, said the company was interested in building bridges between film and TV through the acquisitions of movies that can be viewed in different formats.

“The Mystery of the...

In a working-class barrio high above downtown Caracas is a dusty patch of land, no bigger than a basketball court, with a small stand of bedraggled pine trees. It is the namesake for a neighborhood, Los Pinos. From here you can see the glimmering skyscrapers below, where private supermarkets charge $13 for a box of Cheerios. The minimum wage is $12 a month.

Such inequities have helped spur successive waves of protests in Venezuela, and less than a year ago, the country was a tinderbox. Thousands marched against what was widely seen...

In a forgotten region of Southern Italy, projected against a sweeping cliff overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, La Guarimba International Film Festival screens a dynamic program of boundary-pushing short films — all at no cost to an eclectic audience of Catholic nonnas and independent filmmakers from around the globe. Amantea is a tiny seaside town in Calabria, the poorest region in Italy and one of the poorest in all of Europe. Every summer, La Guarimba floods the town with young cinephiles and adventurous Italian tourists. But the provocative, inclusive, and avant-garde programming is sometimes more challenging than the audience may have bargained for.

Now in its seventh year, La Guarimba has played short films from nearly every continent, earned the support of the Ministry of Culture and U.S. Embassy, and showcased nearly 50 films that later earned a Vimeo Staff Pick badge, one of the highest honors a short can receive in the internet age.

Disney Media Distribution Latin America (Dmdla) has unveiled two new original TV series projects, teaming with high-profile producers on the Latino TV drama scene.

“Cazadores de milagros,” a 13-episode TV series, co-produced by Disney with Spain’s Mediapro Group, Mexico’s Btf Media and Miami-based Somos Productions, will combine fiction and reality.

Partnering with Naím Media Group, Disney is co-developing “Americana,” a 10-episode series set in late 19th century Brazil.

Produced by Btf in Mexico, “Cazadores” focuses on a skeptical journalist who needs a scoop to save his career, a young and brilliant heiress of a media empire, and an enigmatic clairvoyant, torn between faith and necessity.

Their destinies cross on a unique mission that will force them to question their doubts and certainties about faith as they investigate real cases of potential miracles. Sometimes, this particular team will find a scientific explanation to them; on other occasions, reason falls short when explain events.

What's the Russian equivalent of Kool-Aid? Whatever it is, it's definitely red – and Oliver Stone has eagerly drunk it down. The trailers for The Putin Interviews, Showtime's four-part series documenting a series of conversations between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Stone, would have you believe that you're going to hear some pretty hard-hitting stuff as the autocrat and the filmmaker face off, Frost-Nixon style. What we got instead was a series of softballs lobbed lovingly in the direction of one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world.

For his latest doc, Oliver Stone and Vladimir Putin watched Dr Strangelove and had a natter about the horrors of nuclear war. Could May, Merkel and co learn a few things from the big screen?

Let’s call it Ruskie business: for his latest documentary, a four-hour series to be screened in the Us next month, Oliver Stone has interviewed Vladimir Putin. It’s not the first time the Oscar-winning writer and director has had a face-to-face with a contentious world leader, having previously profiled Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. But this project has an irresistible movie twist, featuring footage of Stone and Putin watching Dr Strangelove together. Apparently, the Russian president had never seen Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black 1964 satire, so Stone screened it for him.

Hopefully, Putin learned something about the dangers of atomic brinksmanship from the film, rather than imagining himself shirtless, rodeo-riding a nuclear bomb.

While it remains to be seen whether or not Sean Penn will face legal repercussions over his interview with drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán, Penn has faced some backlash from journalists and pundits. "If the byline [on the El Chapo piece] said 'Hunter S. Thompson,' no one would be as critical of this piece," a source tells People, "and instead in the spirit of Gonzo journalism it would be lauded as courageous and unprecedented." (Presumably, some of the issues raised by journalists will be addressed in an upcoming Charlie Rose/Penn interview, which Rose announced Tuesday.) Penn does have something of a...

While it remains to be seen whether or not Sean Penn will face legal repercussions over his interview with drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán, Penn has faced some backlash from journalists and pundits. "If the byline [on the El Chapo piece] said 'Hunter S. Thompson,' no one would be as critical of this piece," a source tells People, "and instead in the spirit of Gonzo journalism it would be lauded as courageous and unprecedented." (Presumably, some of the issues raised by journalists will be addressed in an upcoming Charlie Rose/Penn interview, which Rose announced Tuesday.) Penn does have something of a...

China will continue to be the big box-office focus internationally in 2015, but the importance of other key markets can’t be discounted. Among them, Korea, Russia and Brazil remain hugely significant territories for the studios, while nations such as Malaysia and Venezuela are on the rise — and present their own challenges. China has expansive growth, a massive population and throws off huge grosses every time a Hollywood movie gets in under the quota system — and it keeps hurtling forward. Leaving aside the big dragon in the room, I looked at these other key markets that have been experiencing their own shifts, good and bad. Here’s a snapshot of how they fared this year and what we can expect up ahead:

Brazil

A funny thing happened to Brazil in 2014: the World Cup helped the box office. Although the national team advanced all the way to the third-place match, people still went to the movies.

In a move that could make for the hottest political thriller since Ben Affleck’s Argo, Oliver Stone has taken on the task of bringing Nsa whistleblower Edward Snowden’s story to the big screen.

Never one to shy away from political or controversial issues, Stone’s career heights have seen him tackle the Vietnam War (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July), Us Presidents (JFK, W., Nixon), Cuban leader Fidel Castro (Comandante, Looking for Fidel), and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (South of the Border).

Recent efforts like Savages and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps have largely been regarded as minor works from the renowned filmmaker, and taking on a project like Snowden’s story has ignited hope that Stone is about to return to form.

The writer-director has a history of working with some of the biggest names in the industry, and all eyes are turning to who he...

Africa-set drama about a doctor working in famine relief zone set to become Penn's fifth film behind the camera

Sean Penn, Michael Moore and Oliver Stone pay tribute to Hugo Chávez

Sean Penn will return to the director's chair for the first time since 2007's critically acclaimed Into the Wild on the African-set romantic drama The Last Face, reports Variety.

Penn's fifth film behind the cameras stars Javier Bardem and Charlize Theron as a doctor and relief worker who become involved. Bardem, described as a talented and charismatic medic, must eventually choose between romance and dedication to his work saving lives in war zones. Adele Exarchopoulos, the young French star of controversial Cannes Palme d'Or winner Blue Is the Warmest Colour, has been cast as a journalist.

Continue reading...

The life of Hugo Chávez is coming to the silver screen.

U.S. director and Latin American politics aficionado Oliver Stone will direct a film about the life of the late Venezuelan leader, the Associated Press reports.

“Oliver Stone is making a very beautiful film about our commander Hugo Chávez,” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said Thursday, according to the Associated Press. He said the film would be finished within the next few months.

The three-time Oscar winner already portrayed Chávez on the big screen for the 2010 documentary “South of the Border,” about leftwing governments in Latin America.

Stone has a thing for leftwing Latin American strongmen. He’s also filmed a pair of documentaries about Cuba’s former Communist dictator Fidel Castro.

Chávez died on March 5 after a two-year long struggle with a cancer in his pelvic region that he never publicly identified.

Here's a story that the New York Times has yet to carry. A petition, signed by 23 leading Us academics, authors and film-makers, has been launched which urges the paper's "public editor" to examine the Times's inconsistent coverage of two Latin American countries.

They argue that there are disparities between its largely negative reporting on Venezuela during the presidency of Hugo Chávez (who died in March) and its less critical reporting on Honduras under its successive leaders, Roberto Micheletti and Porfirio Lobo.

Among the petition's signatories are more than a dozen experts on Latin America and the media plus Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman, and the film directors Oliver Stone and Michael Moore. Here's the full script of the petition…

Dear Margaret Sullivan,

In a recent column, you observed:

Although individual words and phrases may not amount to very much in the great flow produced each day, language matters. When news...

Maduro government accuses Us of being behind post-election violence and insists Tracy was plotting to destabilise Venezuela

Venezuela's government has rejected comments by Barack Obama about the country's political crisis and the arrest of a Us film-maker, accusing Washington of being behind violence that has followed the recent presidential election.

During his visit to Latin America, Obama said the allegations against documentary film-maker Tim Tracy, 35, were "ridiculous."

But Venezuela's interior minister, Miguel Rodríguez Torres, has insisted that intelligence agents tracking Tracy since late 2012 had uncovered ample evidence he was plotting with militant anti-government factions to destabilise the country.

"When you want to do intelligence work in another country, all those big powers who do this type of spying, they often use the facade of a film-maker, documentary-maker, photographer or journalist," Rodríguez Torres told state TV. "Because with that facade, they can go anywhere, penetrate any place."

Obama's comments about Tracy,...

Timothy Tracy accused by officials of paying right-wing groups of provoking post-election unrest on behalf of Us intelligence

An American film-maker was formally charged late Saturday by Venezuelan officials who accuse him of paying right-wing groups to foment post-election unrest on behalf of Us intelligence.

The federal prosecutor's office said Timothy Tracy, 35, of West Hollywood, California, was charged with crimes including conspiracy, association for criminal purposes and use of a false document.

On Thursday, President Nicolas Maduro said he had personally ordered Tracy's arrest on suspicion of "creating violence in the cities of this country" in the wake of a 14 April presidential election narrowly won by the hand-picked successor to Hugo Chávez.

Opposition candidate Henrique Capriles contends the election was stolen from him by fraud, setting up post-election tensions and bitter accusations between Venezuela's government and opposition.

Friends say Tracy is an innocent, self-funded documentary film-maker with no political aims or government ties.

Reel-Important People is a monthly column that highlights those individuals in or related to the movies who have left us in recent weeks. Below you'll find names big and small and from all areas of the industry, though each was significant to the movies in his or her own way. Edward Bland (1926-2013) - Composer and filmmaker who wrote, directed and produced the 1959 short documentary The Cry of Jazz, which is on the National Film Registry for historical significance. He was also involved with Herbie Hancock's scoring of Norman Jewison's A Soldier's Story. He died March 14.(Nyt) Hugo Chávez (1954-2013) - Venezuelan president, who recently appeared in Oliver Stone's South of the Border (watch a deleted scene from the DVD below), Emir...

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Hollywood figures who became friends with the Venezuelan president mourn a 'great hero' and 'champion of the poor'

Hollywood liberals Sean Penn, Michael Moore and Oliver Stone have paid tribute to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who died on 5 March after a long battle with cancer, at the age of 58.

Penn, who first met Chávez in Venezuela in 2007 and attended a candlelit vigil for the stricken firebrand in Bolivia in December, bemoaned the politician's lack of credibility in North America. "Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion," he said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter. "I lost a friend I was blessed to have. My thoughts are with the family of President Chávez and the people of Venezuela." Penn added: "Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of vice president [Nicolas] Maduro.

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Hollywood figures who became friends with the Venezuelan president mourn a 'great hero' and 'champion of the poor'

Hollywood liberals Sean Penn, Michael Moore and Oliver Stone have paid tribute to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who died on 5 March after a long battle with cancer, at the age of 58.

Penn, who first met Chávez in Venezuela in 2007 and attended a candlelit vigil for the stricken firebrand in Bolivia in December, bemoaned the politician's lack of credibility in North America. "Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion," he said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter. "I lost a friend I was blessed to have. My thoughts are with the family of President Chávez and the people of Venezuela." Penn added: "Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of vice president [Nicolas] Maduro.

Sean Penn is mourning a friend. And the Oscar winner maintains that he's not the only one who's suffered a loss. "Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion." Penn said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter in response to the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, whom the actor first met in 2007. The controversial world leader died today at 58 following a long battle with cancer. "I lost a friend I was blessed to have," continued Penn, whose relationship with the nationalist Chávez made him the target of much scorn—and the butt of many a tweeted joke about being...

During more than 14 years in office, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez routinely challenged the status quo at home and internationally. He polarized Venezuelans with his confrontational and domineering style, yet was also a masterful communicator and strategist who tapped into Venezuelan nationalism to win broad support, particularly among the poor. "El Comandante," as he was known, even stayed in touch with the Venezuelan people as his health deteriorated, sending Twitter messages and making phone calls broadcast on television. But those messages dropped off as his health deteriorated. And on Tuesday, the fiery populist who declared a socialist revolution in Venezuela and crusaded against U.

Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, 58, has died after a long struggle with cancer. The controversial figure was the President of Venezuela since 1999. Read on for more details.

Hugo Chávez, controversial president of Venezuela, has passed away on Mar. 5 after a battle with cancer. The President had not been seen in public for several months due to his illness. Vice President Nicolas Maduro had been standing in for the ill leader. The Vice President announced President Chávez’s passing.

President Hugo Chávez’s Cancer Battle

President Chávez first announced his diagnosis with cancer in a televised address from Havana, Cuba on June 30, 2011, confirming that he was recovering from an operation on June 10, 2011 to remove an abscessed tumor with cancerous cells. On July 17, 2011, it was reported that he had returned to Cuba for further treatments.

On July 9, 2012, the president declared himself fully recovered from cancer, just three months before an election in which...

Actor Sean Penn lent his support to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez while in Bolivia, saying that the cancer-stricken leader is "one of the most important forces we've had on this planet."

Penn made a surprise appearance at a candlelight vigil for Chavez in Bolivia on Monday, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Chavez is currently in Cuba undergoing his fourth cancer-related surgery since June 2011. “Thank you, Sean,” Venezuelan ambassador Crisbeylee Gonzalez said, according to THR, “for joining us and for wanting to be here. We know President Chavez is a good friend of yours, and you didn’t hesitate one second about coming here with us to this vigil."

“He’s one of the most important forces we’ve had on this planet, and I’ll wish him nothing but that great strength he has shown over and over again. I do it in love, and I do it in gratitude,...

Venezuelan president places deputy in charge but vows to return from Cuba after 'absolutely essential' fourth procedure

Hugo Chávez underwent cancer-related surgery in Havana on Tuesday, his fourth operation in 18 months, after announcing that an examination had found a recurrence of malignant cells. The Venezuelan president returned to Cuba on Monday for further surgery.

"It is absolutely necessary, absolutely essential that I undergo this new surgical procedure. And this must happen in the next days," Chávez said in a nationwide broadcast on Saturday night.

Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, a close ally of Chávez who met with him in Cuba on Monday, said: "Commander Hugo Chávez is being operated on at this moment. It's a very delicate operation.

"He's passing through one of the hardest moments of his life. Our heart and our solidarity go out to a historic president."

Chávez first had surgery 18 months ago to remove an undisclosed type...

Why would anyone want to sit through The Untold History of the United States, a documentary series directed and narrated by Oliver Stone? Fifteen years ago, no one would have asked that question; love him or hate him, the director of Platoon, JFK, Natural Born Killers, and other feverish, politically charged dramas was a giant — an influential filmmaker who pushed the medium forward while ripping the scabs off social and historical wounds. Today, Stone is thought of as Sam Peckinpah by way of Michael Moore — a Hollywood outsider and foot-in-mouth political crank, chilling with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in the documentary South of the Border and suggesting that American media fixated on the Holocaust and “scapegoated” Hitler while downplaying Soviet deaths during World War II because of “Jewish domination of the media.” For these and other reasons, viewers might consider the messenger of Untold History and then dismiss its message,...

With his latest film Savages, the acclaimed Us director turns his vision to the murderous narcotics-fuelled conflict in Mexico

A man steps across the floor of what seems to be a basement or dungeon, on a film shot by a wobbly, handheld camera. Blood, sticky underfoot, runs beneath his boots – and the camera catches what seems to be a severed head. The scene is being played on a computer screen, watched by an intense young man, transfixed. A beautiful girl looks also, over his shoulder. "Is that Iraq?", she asks, squirming at the degenerate and apparently gratuitous cruelty. "Mexico," replies the man with a grunt, clearly terrified himself. Welcome to the latest film by Hollywood's – even America's – heretic-in-chief, Oliver Stone. Unsurprisingly, this brief exchange is charged with greater meaning than it appears at first sight, and the film's director has come to elaborate.

The physical presence of Oliver Stone is...