CANNES: If you are a Latin American revolutionary, a tormented boxer, a drug-addled soccer genius or IRA hungerstriker, then the Cannes film festival was the place to come for a flattering celluloid version of your life.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Mike Tyson, Diego Maradona and Bobby Sands all had films dedicated to them and each one of the highly controversial figures was given an easy ride.

The most impressive in scale and the only one of the four films in the running for the Palme d’Or prize was Steven Soderbergh’s marathon epic on the rise and fall of the world’s most celebrated guerrilla leader.

It did not scoop the Palme d’Or but Benicio Del Toro took best actor award in the festival that ended on Sunday for the title role in the two-part, 268-minute “Che”.

The film follows the Marxist rebel from guerrilla warfare in Cuban jungles, through a 1964 trip to New York to address the United Nations, to his ignominious end in 1967 in the mountains of Bolivia.

The Bolivia episode does show Che failing miserably, if heroically, to export Cuba’s revolution, but that aside there is practically no criticism of a figure revered by millions but denounced by others for ordering ruthless executions and being a mouthpiece for a failed ideology.

Soderbergh said he simply shot two episodes in Che’s life that were good movie material. “I’m compelled by the fact that he twice gave up everything to put himself on the line for someone else,” he said.

Che turns up in a very minor role in two other flattering films on controversial figures screened in Cannes.

Boxer Mike Tyson and Argentinian soccer icon Diego Maradona have a tattoo of the handsome revolutionary on their bodies.

Those two men also have in common that they were in their prime in the 1980s, made it to the pinnacle of their respective sports and spiralled into drugs and high-profile self-destruction.

The former world heavyweight boxing champion flew into Cannes for the premiere of “Tyson” a week ago. The sympathetic picture by James Toback takes Tyson from humble beginnings on the mean streets of Brooklyn through his phenomenal rise in boxing and his epic fall marked by addiction, humiliation in the ring and a rape conviction.

The 41-year-old retired fighter says, as does Maradona, that he is now off drugs and into family life.

The Argentinian, who also turned up on the French Riviera for his premiere, gets an even easier ride in Emir Kusturica’s documentary titled “Maradona by Kusturica”.

The Serbian director depicts him as a rebel fighting Western imperialism first through football and now through his friendship with Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the leftwing Venezualan President Hugo Chavez.

Maradona is one of the greatest footballers of all time. England fans remember him for his role in Argentina’s knocking England out of the 1986 World Cup in a 2-1 victory, in which he scored both goals, one of them notoriously with his hand.

For Kusturica, the victory was a triumph by the “Third World” over the West, which he said imposes its rule on countries like Argentina and Serbia, using weapons such as the International Monetary Fund and Nato bombs.

Finally, a biopic on Northern Irish prisoner Bobby Sands who died in 1981 after 66 days on hunger strike, also clearly takes the protagonist’s side. His death was part of an epic battle of wills with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

“Hunger”, which scooped the Cannes Camera d’Or prize for the best first feature film, is likely to spark controversy in Britain where some commentators have denounced it as a celebration of the martyrdom of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorist.

Director Steve McQueen denied he portrays Sands as a hero.

Yet the film gives the British viewpoint scant mention, and shows much brutality by prison warders against IRA inmates as they escalate their protests to demand political prisoner status.—AFP