The Wrap’s Steve Pond:
The Cuban-born, Venezuelan-raised actress Maria Conchita Alonso will lead a protest against Oliver Stone’s documentary “South of the Border” when the filmmaker appears at a screening and Q&A for the film on Friday. …
Alonso says she will lead a peaceful protest … outside the Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex in Santa Monica, where Stone is scheduled to do a Q&A session after the 7:20 p.m. showing of his film.
“We’re just trying to let him know that we are against his film, that it is all lies,” she says. “That’s all we can do right now. We don’t have the money to make a million-dollar documentary like he did, so what else can we do?”
Alonso says she wants Stone to answer a couple of questions about his film: where did he get the money to finance it, and why did he “refuse to interview everyday Venezuelan people about their lives under this oppressive regime?” ….
In the past, Alonso has been an outspoken critic of actors Sean Penn and Danny Glover (her co-stars in “Colors” and “Predator 2,” respectively), who have expressed support for Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Both rulers are shown in a favorable light in Stone’s documentary, which the New York Times’ Stephen Holden called “a provocative, if shallow, exaltation of Latin American socialism.”
“Oliver Stone is a great director, but he’s the minister of propaganda for Chavez,” Alonso tells TheWrap. “He doesn’t show the truth of the poverty in Venezuela, he doesn’t show the shortages of food and medicine and electricity in the whole country. It’s one of the worst countries in the world in crime rate, in economy, in poverty, and he doesn’t show that.
“And how can a filmmaker like him support a government that controls all media, closes independent outlets, and arrests journalists both foreign and domestic?”
Read the full piece here.