The Liberator gets right the multiracial faces of Simon Bolivar's revolution. Staring Edgar Ramirez. "He was a physically slight man: He was 5-[foot]-6, barely 130 pounds; he had a very meager chest, he had spindly legs, he had hands that were small and delicate, like a woman's almost," she says. "And the figure that we see on the screen #EdgarRamirez is big, #handsome #chunky # hunky Arana says it's especially important to get Bolivar's story right because of all the ways in which it's been wronged: "In the past 200 years since #Bolivar died, his legacy has been manipulated in so many ways. ... You know, #FranciscoFranco who was the right-wing #dictator of # Spain and #AugustoPinochet who was the right-wing dictator of # Chile took him as their hero, and so did the revolutionaries, like #FidelCastro and #CheGuevera So this is a life that has been used for many purposes." One of the ideas the film gets right, Arana says, is the #multiracial face of Bolivar's #revolution. On screen, as in real life, #Bolivar sees a #colonialsystem steeped in inequality, #racialhierarchy and #slavery, and fights to dismantle those divisions. For # Edgar Ramirez, that legacy of Bolivar's liberation still matters because "one of the greatest debates in #LatinAmerica will always be the #socialgap between #richpeople and #poorpeople, and that is something we inherited from colonial times. ... There were so many #privileges within the colonial system given by social position and #racialbackground. That, I think, has affected how our societies developed, and Bolivar was very aware of that." And because of Bolivar's impassioned campaign for abolition, Ramirez says, his story in #SouthAmerica is connected to the #NorthAmerican story. #Abolition had started, the process had started, already in South America three or four decades before #Lincoln's time," he says. Despite the film's imperfections, biographer #MarieArana says she hopes audiences will see it as an entry point to understand the man and the landscape that made modern #LatinAmerica. Copyright © 2016 NPR http://www.npr.org/2014/10/02/353243993/latin-american-icon-simon-bolivar-gets-biopic-treatment-in-liberator
