Sept. 29 (Bloomberg) -- On a lawn in his rural hometown, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gets so carried away riding a child’s bicycle that it breaks under his weight and he falls to the ground laughing.

“Whose bicycle is this? I need to pay for it,” Chavez, 55, says.

For those who know Chavez only as the ranting Venezuelan leader who once called former U.S. President George W. Bush “the devil,” Oliver Stone has another side to show in his documentary “South of the Border.”

The film chronicles South America’s socialist shift during the past decade and its emancipation from the International Monetary Fund and so-called predatory capitalism that presidents across the region say shackled their economies in policies that made them too dependent on the U.S. and hurt the poor.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva tells how he repaid his country’s debt to the Washington-based IMF even as the lender encouraged him not to. Bolivia’s Evo Morales says he’s taking more control over how U.S. drug-enforcement agents operate in his country -- while teaching Stone how to chew coca leaves, a tradition of his people. Ecuador’s Rafael Correa says he would only allow a U.S. military base to stay if he could open up one for Ecuador in Miami.

Stone, 63, centers the film on Chavez, who celebrated 10 years in office on Feb. 2, and alleges the U.S. media has smeared him by calling him a dictator and part of the “axis of evil.” The film opens with a Fox News report that the “dictators” now are drug addicts as well.

‘A Fair Shake’

“We’re hearing one side of the story in America,” Stone told reporters at the New York screening last week. Chavez is “the underdog and I want to give him a fair shake,” he said.

The movie doesn’t mention Chavez’s blacklisting of millions of people who signed a petition seeking a recall vote against him in 2004; the persecution of political rivals; the creation of a new “Capital District” to usurp power from the opposition-led Caracas city government; and the refusal to renew the broadcasting license of Radio Caracas Television, the country’s oldest station. Chavez threatened as recently as Sept. 24 on Larry King Live that he would shut down opposition TV station Globovision.

“South of the Border” notes that the democratically elected leaders who emerged since the late 1990s come from groups common to the region, such as the military (Chavez), Indian tribes (Morales), unions (Lula) and the church (Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo).

“To me it seems as if for the first time, the governors look like the people they govern,” Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner says in the film. Lula says it was only through democracy that a worker like him, or any of his colleagues, could have reached power.

Oil Wealth

Chavez, whose 2006 United Nations speech calling Bush “the devil” is included in the film, says he’s only facing attacks from the U.S. because of the oil wealth of Venezuela, the biggest producer of crude in South America. Morales blames criticism on the fact that Bolivia is rich in natural-gas reserves.

While the movie is explicitly rosy in its picture of South America’s politics, it’s a tonic dose of a perspective rarely seen in U.S. media coverage of the region.

As a Brazilian, I’ve been trying for years to make the point with my American friends that socialism emerged in the region in opposition to dictatorships. It was the political left that fought the right-wing, nationalist governments that dominated the region in different periods of the last century. Granted, Chavez certainly muddies any positive picture.

‘Funny and Entertaining’

“It is a must-see for everyone,” said actress Susan Sarandon at the Sept. 23 U.S. premiere in New York, together with Presidents Chavez and Morales. “What is great about it is that it is really educational, because we are not getting that information in that perspective, but at the same time it is very funny and entertaining.”

“Sooner or later we needed to say the truth,” Morales, 49, said at the screening. “This liberation process is unstoppable. There’s no way back.”

The movie ends with President Barack Obama’s election, implying that finally in the U.S. a man from the people reached power too.

With the film’s always-present simultaneous translation from Spanish into English we’re unable to forget that we’re watching an effort to maintain dialogue between the North and the South, between two continents that have in common the fight against colonialism, the embrace of progress and the passionate defense of freedom.

(Fabiola Moura is a reporter for Bloomberg News. Any opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Fabiola Moura in New York at fdemoura@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: September 29, 2009 00:01 EDT