Bauer aims camera next at Guevara

Docu will be based on revolutionary's personal items

By CHARLES NEWBERY

Argentine helmer Tristan Bauer, whose Falklands/Malvinas war pic "Enlightened by Fire" (Iluminados por el fuego) won this year's Tribeca Film Festival, is moving forward with his next project, a documentary about revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara.

"It will be an intimate look at the thinking and the humanity" of Guevara, based on his personal letters, photos, writings and other paraphernalia kept by his widow in Havana, Bauer told Daily Variety.

"He is a figure that is always growing. The particularity of this film is that the widow opened up for us all this material that reflects a deeper personality and thinking than is commonly known," Bauer said.

Spanish pubcaster Radio Television Espanola and Argentina's Universidad Nacional de General San Martin, which co-produced "Enlightened," have agreed to co-produce the $600,000 project for a 2007 release. Other producers are expected to sign on.

Rolling later this year, pic will lense in Argentina, Congo, Cuba and Prague, as well as other areas of Latin America.

Bauer is writing the script with Carolina Scaglione, with whom he teamed on previous docs "Los libros y la noche" (The Books and the Night) and "Cortazar," about the Argentine writers Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, respectively.

"I am really attracted to the language of documentaries," Bauer said.