US Edition THE relatives of Tamara Bunke, a communist guerrilla who died fighting in the Bolivian jungle with Che Guevara, are trying to block a Hollywood film that will portray them as lovers.
The project, funded by Warner Bros, will focus on Bunke's tumultuous life. The Argentine-born German was shot, aged 30, by the Bolivian army in 1967, six weeks before Guevara's death.
Antonio Banderas is playing the revolutionary leader and Nicole Kidman is being considered to star as "Tania", the intended title.
Christian Schertz, the Berlin lawyer representing the Bunke family, said that he would take legal action against the film-makers should they attempt to go ahead with what he described as an "untruthful" portrait.
Before unification, Bunke was something of a folk legend in East Germany. At one time, there were 200 youth clubs named after the young woman who followed Guevara to the jungle after meeting him in East Germany on his first visit there in 1960. Berlin still has a Tamara Bunke youth club and an organisation dedicated to "youth understanding".
Alex Butler, the vice president of Agamemnon Films, who conceived the film, said: "Tamara Bunke was in fact a revolutionary nutter, but we are going to portray her in a more favourable light."
He plans to depict her as an agent of the East German secret police, the Stasi, who spied on students and gleaned information by sleeping with businessmen and diplomats. The film, he says, will suggest that these experiences led to her becoming disillusioned with East Germany.
Mr Schertz says that Bunke's family, led by Nadja, her 90-year mother, who lives in east Berlin, would fight the production. "They are against any bio-pic of Tamara Bunke which distorts the truth," he said. "We have proof that Tamara Bunke and Che Guevara were not lovers. It is also certainly not true that she was obliged to sleep with businessmen and diplomats."
Bunke's parents were German communists who fled to Argentina in the 1930s. The family returned to East Germany in 1952 and Bunke was 23 when she met Guevara. She followed him back to Cuba, was recruited by the secret service using the codename Tania, and assisted Guevara in trying to start an uprising against the US-backed La Paz goverment.
Mrs Bunke has already gone to great efforts to defend her daughter's reputation. In 1997 she travelled to Moscow to obtain a written statement from the successors to the KGB declaring that Bunke never worked for them. The German government, which now holds the Stasi files, has confirmed that it had no records on her.
Of Mrs Bunke's opposition to the film, Mr Butler said: "She is very suspicious of anything surrounding Hollywood."