As the 14th international BAFICI film festival gets underway and the city is awash with cinephiles, we thought we’d give you a run down of great Argentine directors so that you can hold your own this week when chatting to the moustache-twiddling, beret-sporting, Deleuze loving (that one’s for the real pros) film enthusiasts.

Far from a comprehensive list, our Top 5 Argentine Directors sets out to tell you five directors you should know about, and should give you plenty to chew on while BAFICI is underway.

Leopoldo Torre Nilsson

Leopoldo Torre Nilsson (1924-78)

The grandfather of Argentine film, Leopoldo Torre Nilsson helped bring prestige to Argentine cinema and was the most important figure in inspiring the younger generation of film-makers who started the new-wave in Argentine cinema at the beginning of the 1960s. According to international filmmaker Roman Polanski, he helped bring Argentine cinema up to international quality without ignoring subjects that were integral to Argentina.

Obsessed with the decline of the bourgeois society in his country, his films were often filled with sexual and societal frustration and peopled with dark characters with shadowy pasts who move in decadent environments. He directed. with humour and finesse.

Born in Buenos Aires, the son of the pioneering Argentine director, Leopoldo Torres Ríos, Leopoldo spent his formative years working under with his father and lost in the books of Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Proust and James Joyce. His mother was an Argentine of Swedish descent and he cited her compatriot, the director Ingmar Bergman, as one of his greatest influences. He lived young and directed fast, making 30 features in little over 25 years.

His most fruitful collaboration was with his wife, the writer Beatriz Guido. Together, they adapted her novels ‘La mano en la trampa’ and ‘La casa del ángel’ into screenplays that became two of his most successful and critically acclaimed films. When the latter came out, French filmmaker and critic Éric Rohmer called it “the best film to have arrived from South America since the beginnings of cinema.”

No stranger to Argentine literature, Torre Nilsson was a friend of the author Ernesto Sabato and also known for directing screenplays based on the work of other Argentine writers including Roberto Arlt, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jorge Luis Borges, and gauchesque poet, José Hernández.

For more information find Leopoldo Torre Nilsson on IMDB or visit his website

Leonardo Favio

Leonardo Favio (born 1938) 

Born Fuad Jorge Jury, Leonardo Favio lived through a tough childhood in a small town in the north of Mendoza. An Argentine of Syrian descent, he is a true artistic polymath who built a career out of directing, writing, composing, singing and acting. Much lauded in his home continent, many believe he never got the recognition he deserved on the international scene.

Working under the tutelage of Argentine director Torre Nilsson, he was invited to act in films at the end of the 1950s, and the beginning of his career as a director followed shortly after with the production of his first short film in 1960. Four years later, his debut feature ‘Crónica de un niño solo’ cemented his place at the forefront of Argentine cinema.

The influence of filmmakers like the Spanish born Luis Buñuel and founder of French new-wave cinema François Truffaut was evident, although his personal style and strong aesthetics also shone through. He turned the focus away from a popular fixation with the urban bourgeoisie, towards the tough life at the fringes of society. For this reason he is credited with helping to break the barrier between popular culture and high art.

His films, despite shirking away from the mainstream and embracing the experimental, enjoyed a mass appeal in Argentina. Another of his most acclaimed films, ‘El romance del Aniceta y la Francisca’, is considered by many to be one of Argentina’s best.

An element in his life that cannot be ignored is his vehement support of Peronism. In 1999 he released an exhaustive 340-minute documentary about his political idol: ex-president and controversial figure Juan Domingo Perón.

In 2010, he was appointed Argentina’s Cultural Ambassador by fellow Peronist and current president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

For more information find Leonardo Favio on IMDB

Fernando ‘Pino’ Solanas

Fernando ‘Pino’ Solanas (born 1936)

Fernando ‘Pino’ Solanas was born in Buenos Aires province and has made his name as one of the most important Argentine directors and documentary-makers.

Unlike Favio, Solanas has gained a global recognition, winning the Golden Bear at Germany’s Berlinale, the Special Jury prize at the Venice film festival and the Best Director award at Cannes.

Solanas’ work comes inextricably linked with politics. Any discussion on the director must surely go hand-in-hand with the mention of ‘Grupo Cine Liberación’ – a cinematic movement with which he was strongly affiliated. In the 1960s and 70s, the movement offered a reaction to Latin American politics and global cinema, focusing on making films that were socially and politically committed rather than purely entertainment driven. With their militant cinema they tried to demonstrate that Argentina was a society in crisis.

Their trademark was to make films anonymously, a move that encouraged collective creative processes and also protected them from political repression at a time when dictatorships were starting to emerge across the continent. Their most acclaimed film from the period was a four-hour documentary titled ‘La hora de los hornos: Notas y testimonios sobre el neocolonialismo, la violencia y la liberación’. The film became a symbol of activist cinema during the zenith of leftist politics.

For more information find Fernando ‘Pino’ Solanas on IMDB or visit his website

Armando Bó

Armando Bó (1914-81)

The inclusion of director Armando Bó in this list might raise a few eyebrows, but his influence and cult following should not be underestimated.

US filmmaker John Waters once said that when he was searching for inspiration he would look to the Argentine director’s films and wish he spoke Spanish. And well, that’s about as apt an introduction as the director could hope for. He described ‘Fuego’ (Bó’s best-known film) as “a huge influence”, admitting “I forgot how much I stole”.

In a time when sexploitation films were taken more seriously and the line between art-house and soft-core was slightly blurrier, Armando Bó was king. This auteur of sorts made 30 films between 1954 and 1980 – none of which were too subtle or nuanced. He hacked his way through plots, played for slapstick laughs and flashed a lot of flesh but the audience loved it and kept coming back for more.

He made 27 films starring the now retired model and actress Isabel Sarli. Sarli was Miss Argentina 1955, the Brigitte Bardot of Latin America and the filmmaker’s real-life lover.

“You inspired us all to a life of cheap exhibitionism, exaggerated sexual desires and a love for all that is trash-ridden in cinema,” Waters once said of Sarli, but it’s a comment that works just fine for Bó too.

For more information find Armando Bó on IMDB 

Juan José Campanella

Juan José Campanella (born 1959)

Probably the most recognisable name on this list for a contemporary audience, Juan José Campanella is a member of the exclusive two-man club of Oscar-winning Argentine directors. He has spent much of his working life in the United States and has directed several English language films as well as a number of North American television series.

Born and raised in Buenos Aires, he began studying engineering at university but famously dropped out with only a year to go to pursue a career in filmmaking.

He is credited with helping to restore pride in the Argentine film industry which has historically suffered from “chronic self-depreciation”. “In Argentina, a Hollywood movie is innocent until proven guilty. An Argentine movie is the other way around. I have to work really hard to break down that barrier,” he told one US publication in an interview.

Having been previously nominated for an Oscar in 2001 for his film ‘El hijo de la novia’ (‘The son of the bride’), Campanella’s talents as a director were finally recognised in 2010 when his film ‘El secreto de sus ojos’ (‘The secret in their eyes’) was awarded the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

A classy, unpredictable film noir set in 1975 Buenos Aires – it brought the spotlight back on Argentine cinema and helped make him the most bankable homegrown director in Argentine history.

He is currently working on an animated feature called ‘Metegol’ (‘Foosball’) and, the way things are going, it probably won’t be the last time we see him fumbling at his collar nervously at another red carpet event.

For more information find Juan J. Campanella on IMDB

As we approach the first anniversary of his death, the Beyond Borges series arrives at the Argentine essayist and existentialist author Ernesto Sabato.

Ernesto Sabato, the essayist and novelist known for bringing Existentialism to Argentina

As revered at the time of his passing as Jorge Luis Borges, Sabato is widely-known for his role in bringing about justice for the crimes committed by the nation’s military leaders during Argentina’s most infamous dictatorship.

Having received a great deal of critical acclaim for his novels ‘El túnel’ and ‘Sobre héroes y tombas’ he was awarded the 1984 Miguel de Cervantes prize and is commonly regarded one of South America’s most influential writers.

Scientific Beginnings

Born in 1911 in Riojas, a small town in Buenos Aires province, Sabato was the tenth of 11 sons born to Italian immigrant parents. Whilst studying physics and mathematics at the University of La Plata he joined a movement of student activists calling for university reform and independence. By 1933 he had set up a campaign group of communist ideals and, during the same year, was appointed general secretary of the Communist Youth Federation.

Recognising Sabato’s waning belief in Stalin’s methods a year later, the Communist Party of Argentina ordered him to attend the International Lenin School (ILS) for two years. En-route to Moscow he travelled first to Belgium as a delegate of the party and onto Paris, where he is said to have drafted his first unpublished novel, ‘La fuente muda’.

On his return to Argentina he married Matilde Kusminsky Richter, a woman he’d met at a Marxist lecture in Belgium three years earlier, and in 1938 gained his PhD in physics from the University of La Plata aged 27.

Sabato's signature (Photo: Courtesy of Wikipedia)

Nobel laureate Bernardo Houssay helped to secure Sabato a research fellowship at the prestigious Institut Curie in Paris, which placed him among surrealist writers in an environment that would only draw out his creativity.

“During that time of antagonisms, I buried myself with electrometers and graduated cylinders during the morning, and spent the nights in bars with the delirious surrealists. At the Dôme and in the Deux Magots, inebriated with those heralds of chaos and excess, we used to spend many hours creating exquisite cadavers,” he said.

In 1939 he transferred to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and returned to Argentina one year later, intent on leaving science behind. Disillusioned with what he called the dehumanising effects of science, Sabato turned to literature, where he found the unexplained aspects of the human personality relayed in German romanticism and existentialism.

Whilst he became almost immediately active in Argentina’s literary circles he continued juggling his writing and teaching careers until 1943, when he eventually made a more permanent transition to writing.

Echoes of Existentialism

Sabato published essays on a variety of scientific and literary topics, but famously burned many of his manuscripts. A surviving trio of novels includes the existentialist classic ‘El túnel’ (1948), ‘Sobre héroes y tumbas’ (1961), and the lesser known ‘Abaddón el exterminador’ (1974). Though the second is generally considered his best work, it is his first novel which will likely remain the most known outside Argentina.

Originally published in Sur magazine in 1948, it received a great deal of attention from Nobel prize laureates Alfred Camus and Thomas Mann and was almost immediately picked up for translation by French publishing house Gallimard. The first English translation in 1950 was superseded by a 1988 translation and the release of ‘The tunnel’ as a Penguin Classic only two days before Sabato’s death last year will likely secure its place for some time as the most-widely read of all his novels.

The opening lines from 'El Túnel' displayed outside Casa Museo Ernesto Sabato (Photo: Kate Bowen)

Covering little more than 100 pages, ‘El túnel’ takes us on a discomforting journey into the mind of a convicted killer – the painter Juan Pablo Castel. Imprisoned for the murder of his lover Maria Iribarne, the novel begins with his confession and continues by explaining the circumstances of his crime.

Narrated entirely in the first person, the scene is set entirely within Castel’s conscience. Never stepping for a moment outside of his self absorbed and over-analytical mind, we are carried down every dark hallway of his paranoid imagination, charting the growth of every obsessive thought.

Whilst some praise Sabato’s approach for accurately presenting the complexities of a crazed mind, others have criticised him for painting his protagonist with too broad a stroke. Nonetheless, the novel succeeds in raising questions about logical understanding and rationality – is our killer insane, or quite the opposite?

Though the reader may never be intended to achieve empathy, he does achieve, in some terrifying way, an understanding of his subject. Throughout the novel he is asked to continually shift his stance until it rests somewhere between sympathy and abhorrence.

Since the opening lines of the novel grab the readers attention so firmly, Sabato sets himself the challenge of continuing a novel where the outcome is already known and the element of intrigue is lacking. While this does demand a certain tolerance from the reader, Sabato steers clear of tedium with an energy and a darkness that could only have been maintained successfully in such a short novel.

Opinion remains divided, however. Some argue that Sabato’s stab at the existentialist genre amounts to nothing more than an un-engaging retrospective that fails to reveal much about the human condition. For others, it is a novel well deserving of its place among the likes of Camus’ ‘The stranger’, Franz Kafka’s ‘The trial’ and George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen eighty-four’ on a shelf of existentialist classics.

Many crime novels have since offered slices of insight into their killer’s minds but, at the time, Sabato’s edgy existentialism followed a genuinely innovative European wave and represented the height of originality in Argentine writing.

Political Poles

Though Sabato may always be remembered as a tireless campaigner for justice and human rights he has also come under occasional fire for his changing political positions. Where the likes of Leopoldo Lugones and Leopoldo Marechal made themselves unpopular with their political views, Borges and Sabato managed to swing their political stances relatively easily and relatively unnoticed.

Journalist Osvaldo Bayer, however, accused him of forming part of the “Argentine hypocrisy” in light of his actions and apparently contradictory statements made during the Argentine dictatorship of 1976- 1983.

Sabato was characterised by his thick framed glasses, bald head and moustache

Critical of the government of Juan Domingo Perón, Sabato originally appeared welcoming of the military dictatorship that began in 1976 and lasted until 1983. In the same year, both he and Borges attended a dinner held by the military leader Jorge Rafael Videla, after which Sabato was recorded as commenting that Videla was a “cultured” man. Several years later he explained to a German magazine that the majority of Argentines had welcomed the military power because they’d been able to put an end to the leftist groups threatening the stability of the country.

At the end of the dictatorship, newly elected president Raúl Alfonsín appointed Sabato to preside over the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP) – a newly created commission tasked with investigating the fate of tens of thousands of Argentines who disappeared at the hands of the military.

Sabato presented his findings to Alfonsín on the 20 September 1984. His 50,000 page report entitled ‘Nunca más’ was later used to prosecute nine members of the military establishment for crimes committed during the dictatorship years.

Despite whatever he may have said before, it is the undeniably good work he performed as president of CONADEP that has stayed in the memory of Argentines and resulted in Sabato’s non-literary legacy being shaped to appear as significant as his literary one.

Awaiting the author Luisa Valenzuela in her Belgrano home, I sip my coffee as a number of eccentric artists come and go, eager to discuss a host of wild and wonderful ideas.

Luisa Valenzuela self-portrait.

The raven-haired Valenzuela emerges twenty minutes later, summoning me into her haven-like study. The cerulean room is flanked by rows of books, and an impressive collection of masks, procured over years of extensive travelling.

Valenzuela grew up under the aegis of her mother, herself a prominent Argentine writer named Luisa Mercedes Levinson. The Levinson household served as a literary salon, frequented by some of the great literary names of the twentieth century including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sábato and Julio Cortázar.

Despite publishing her first story, ‘Ese canto’ at the tender age of 21, Valenzuela was not initially drawn to a literary career. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when she took a post at La Nación under the direction of the eminent literary critic Ambrosio Vecino, that she discovered her own writerly vocation.

I’ve come to discuss Valenzuela’s most recent publication, ‘Cuidado con el tigre’, the latest novel in a prodigious collection. Originally written in the 1960s, the novel was withdrawn from publication due to Valenzuela’s concern that it would be misinterpreted as advocating a radical political agenda.

Having come full circle in her literary trajectory, Luisa now feels that her work would be incomplete without the ‘missing link’ of ‘Cuidado’ which, she says, lay the groundwork for her subsequent, more convoluted, explorations of the the use and abuse of power.

Set in the tail end of a decade marked by the fall of Che Guevara, ‘Cuidado’ traces the farcical ins and outs of an Argentine revolutionary cell. More ‘ideological’ than political, the group’s radical antics only lightly veil more complex power structures, played out through the sexual entanglements of its overly zealous members.

Alfredo Navoni, the tiger alluded to in the title, is a man of action committed to the cause. A recurrent figure in Valenzuela’s work – he will resurface again in her later novels, ‘Como en la guerra’ and ‘Cola de lagartija’.

Navoni has friends in high revolutionary places, most notably, the mysterious ‘migrator’, so-named for his relentless travels to border countries. Here we encounter him in the midst of coordinating a rainforest mission, accompanied by the contrary sisters, Emanuela and Amelia, as well as a host of other tangential characters.

As captain of the organisation and a commanding figure, Emanuela strives to direct the mission on a level playing field with her male counterparts, whilst Amelia seeks refuge in domesticity, pandering to the tiger’s every whim. As for Navoni, detached and phlegmatic as any revolutionary caricature, he spends his time hopping between the sisters’ beds.

Amidst this host of idealists, the underground writer Artigueta is the only affiliate able to reflect on the contradictions inherent in striving to advance a political ideal, uncontaminated by emotional ties.

Written before her narrative experiments of the 1970s, ‘Cuidado’ relies on intersecting narrative strands and an impersonal prose style, commensurate with the seemingly objective mission of its protagonists.

Where Valenzuela’s later work is allusive in structure, addressing the violence and paranoia that was endemic under the last dictatorship, this early work tackles political activism head on, albeit with a heavily ironic slant.

In the face of Borges’ ‘art for art’s sake’ mandate, which prevailed in Argentine literature for the most part of the twentieth century, Valenzuela feared her political farce would have been considered anathema to literary prestige. Four decades later, its political resonances have attenuated somewhat, lending it a historic, retrospective dimension.

In her afterword to the novel, she describes how the tiger was obscured by another, less contextual but more striking feline creation, ‘El gato eficaz’. The novel, a series of literary and erotic vignettes of New York, was published in 1972.

The prelude of a ten-year stint in the US, Luisa says it was the “brutal” streets of New York that unleashed an unexpected upsurge of creativity in her, leading her down literary avenues she had not previously contemplated. At the same time, the city served as a place of refuge in the face of the mounting political turmoil and censorship back home.

In 2000, New Yorks’ Whitney Museum exhibited Valenzuela’s short story collection, ‘Aquí pasan cosas raras’, as part of its century overview of the evolution of American arts. Alongside the likes of Susan Sontag, Valenzuela was hailed as a defining writer of the 1970s, and was the only Latin American author to be granted such a prestigious entitlement.

If Valenzuela has firmly carved out a niche for herself in the US arts scene, her work has always assumed a more ambivalent position in relation to Argentine literary tradition. While her prose continues to address national issues, stylistically she has a stronger claim to a more generic Latin American heritage. She accounts her linguistic playfulness and dark humour to the years she spent among contemporary Latin American writers at the universities of Columbia, NYU and Iowa in 1970s.

Although she still publishes articles in the international press, Valenzuela ultimately leans towards fiction. “Sticking to facts, however pertinent,” she says, “doesn’t allow you to delve into metaphor, to understand the deeper implications. Fiction knows better than we do.”

Our meeting comes to a premature close – Valenzuela has to pack her bags since she’s jetting off to a mask festival in Sardinia tomorrow morning. Though she assures me she won’t be turning her hand to new fiction in the near future, masks, both concrete and metaphorical, are to be the subject of her next literary undertaking.

On Saturday 30^th April, Argentine writer Ernesto Sábato died at his home in Santos Lugares, located in the department of Tres de Febrero, at age 99. He suffered from a grave bronchitis. The famous author of novels “The Tunnel” (El Túnel), “On heroes and tombs” (Sobre héroes y tumbas) and “Abbadón, the exterminator” (Abbadón, el exterminador), was veiled in social club Defensores de Santos Lugares.

Public figures such as senator Daniel Filmus, the director for the UNESCO’s International Centre for the Promotion of Human Rights Ignacio Hernaiz and Radical Civic Union’s (UCR) presidential candidate Ricardo Alfonsín, attended the writer’s funeral.

“The greatest is gone”, said Alfonsín while Filmus argued that “Argentina has lost a stronghold of humanist thought, peace and reason”.

President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner also expressed her condolences along side with the Nation’s Secretariat of Culture and Spain’s Embassy.

“My father has been leaving us for a long time. We have been able to keep his suffering in private but this is the end of a journey that started a long time ago”, said Mario Sábato, the late writer’s son, to the press.

Later, Mario Sábato read a letter he wrote about the death of his father. “A few hours ago my father died. I know you all share the sadness we feel in the family, because my father not only belonged to us, but to the many that loved and needed him as much as we did. And this we say with pride and joy”.  And he added, “[my father] once said ‘when I die I want you to ensure that the local people can join me in my final journey and I want to be remembered as a neighbour who was sometimes grouchy but who was basically a good guy’”.

Ernesto Sábato was to be honoured that day at the Buenos Aires’ International Book Fair on behalf of the Culture Institute of Buenos Aires for his 100^th birthday. In spite of the writer’s death, the provincial institute decided not to cancel the act, which took place with the presence of Mario Sábato.

The writer started his professional career as a physicist in Switzerland, Paris and the U.S and obtained a Phd in Physics in 1938. However, he was soon drawn to the literary activity and became friends with the intellectual South Group (Grupo Sur), where he met Argentine writers Victoria Ocampo and Jorge Luis Borges, with whom he maintained a conflictive relationship that gave birth to a literary master piece, Dialogues with Jorge Luis Borges (1976).

Sábato was the second Argentine writer to obtain the Cervantes award (1984) and was a candidate to the Literature Nobel in 2007.

During his career, and by appointment of the then president Raúl Alfonsín, Sábato presided the National Commission for People’s Disappearances (Conadep) between the years 1983 and 1984. The investigative project carried out by the Conadep was later published in the book “Never again” (Nunca Más), a publication that triggered the trials to the Argentine military junta. Sábato wrote the book’s prologue and became a supporter of human rights in the country.

“He would always claim for the apparition of the missing Argentines during the military coup”, said journalist Madgalena Ruiz Guiñazú, “that must not be forgotten”.