Fernando Birri

“I no longer know where the word cinema begins and where the word life ends, nor do I know where the word poetry ends and where the word revolution begins”. Fernando Birri was an Argentine director and poet, considered the father of the “new Latin American cinema”. Surrounded by a family of artists, at the age of 25 he traveled to Italy to study at the Centro Sperimentale de Cinematografía. In those years he began to realize the revolutionary possibilities of cinema, his aesthetic ideas were strongly influenced by the Italian neorealist movement. In 1956 he founded the Instituto de Cinematografía de la Universidad Nacional del Litoral in his hometown, Santa Fe, where he took his first steps as a director and teacher. For Birri, showing the suffering and longings of a community was a moral, aesthetic and political responsibility. To integrate these perspectives into cinema was to give it a documentary function, and represented a moral attitude rather than a question of style. Some of his works include Tiré Dié (1960), Los inundados (1962), La primera fundación de Buenos Aires (1966) and El siglo del viento (1999). His work and legacy have left a deep mark on Latin American cinema, and he has been an inspiration for filmmakers.