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

The Indy’s ‘Beyond Borges’ series has so far introduced five of Argentina’s influential authors. Among them, romantic prose writers Esteban Echeverría and José Mármol, controversial essayist Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and two significant poets of the gauchesque genre, Bartolomé Hidalgo and Estanislao del Campo.

José Hernández

The sixth in the series brings us to the most celebrated poet in the gauchesque canon, and the best-known name in 19th century Argentine writing. José Hernández, the author behind Argentina’s national poem ‘Martin Fierro’, is credited with the immaculate consolidation of the gauchesque genre in a single, yet hugely impacting work.

‘Martin Fierro’

One of few gauchesque poets to have lived for any time as a gaucho, Hernández was born in 1834 and raised on a farm in the Buenos Aires province. He lived a large portion of his life in rural Argentina and fought on the federal side of several civil conflicts and border wars.

His epic poem ‘Martin Fierro’ assumes the voice of an Argentine gaucho conscripted to serve at a border fort in defense of the national frontier.

Originally written in two parts, ‘El gaucho Martin Fierro’ in 1872 and ‘La vuelta de Martin Fierro’ in 1879, the poem follows Fierro as he deserts military service and returns home to find his farm abandoned and his family gone. Together the two parts chart the downfall of an individual who grows rebellious against the laws that have not served to protect him, and descends into a life of crime and immorality.

‘Martin Fierro’ as a Product of its Time

Hernández’s poem is celebrated for having its feet firmly in social conflicts. Twenty years earlier, the Argentine provinces had joined in a confederation that Buenos Aires was not to join until 1862. The four years of provincial revolt that followed were some of Argentina’s most conflictive, and a crucial period in both the process of state formation and the destruction of the gaucho way of life.

New laws of vagrancy and conscription saw Argentina fall under a dual justice system that differentiated between urban and rural, and prioritised one above the other. The passing of a ‘Rural Code’ in 1865 further discriminated against the gaucho by imposing stringent regulations on rural life and labour.

In ‘Martin Fierro’ Hernández returned to the pro-gaucho sentiment and themes of conflict that had traditionally provided the content for populist gauchesque poetry. The poem serves as both a lament for the loss of a romanticised lifestyle, and a protest against the persecution of the gaucho at the hands of a centralised government. In this respect, Hernández revived the element of protest that had faded from gauchesque poetry soon after Bartolomé Hidalgo had given birth to it.

The appearance of ‘El gaucho Martin Fierro’ in 1872 turned the tables on then president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. In his political essay ‘Facundo’, Sarmiento had presented the gaucho as an enemy of civilisation and his barbarism as a product of his rural existence. In ‘Martin Fierro’, Hernández presents Fierro’s behaviour as responsive to the actions of a government that sought to destroy him.

Running of the horses (Photo: Felicitas Molina)

The Success and Legacy of ‘Martin Fierro’

Hernandez’s ‘Martin Fierro’ was an unprecedented and immediate success. ‘El gaucho de Martin Fierro’ had 48,000 copies in circulation throughout Argentina and Uruguay by the time that ‘La vuelta de Martin Fierro’ was published seven years later.

The poem met with similarly positive reactions from critics, who admired the work for its aesthetic merit rather than its protagonist. So convincing was Fierro’s character that many believed him to be a real person, who in spite of his immoral actions, was taken in to the hearts of the Argentine gauchos as someone who fairly depicted their circumstances and their plight.

The success of ‘Martin Fierro’ might be attributed to the fact that it appeared to many to be an example of genuine gaucho literature. Whilst critics take care to differentiate between the poetry of the gaucho and the poetry of the gauchesque, some position Hernández’s poem at the confluence of these two important literary traditions.

By brightening the eight-syllable lines of rural ballads with language, imagery and a local colour that wouldn’t normally have been found in solemn payadas, the gauchesque cultivated a popular style. But in an attempt to imitate a vocabulary and a way of speaking, it had succeeded in creating something forced and false.

Although many poets before him had made use of this same eight-syllable line, none had done so with the same level of authenticity. In the scenes of the poem where payadas are sung, Hernández writes unfalteringly within the discipline of the form. When writing about abstract themes, his language bears the closest resemblance of all the gauchesque poets to the language of a payador singer.

Some interpretations have incurred the wrath of the poem’s supporters by contesting the Argentine nature of the work – annexing it to Spanish literature, or even European. Regardless, the poem is one of few works to have shaped the course of Argentine literature so significantly, drawing inescapable comparisons with the importance of Cervante’s ‘Don Quixote’ in Spanish literature.

Its infamous protagonist has since lent his name to more plazas, avenues, pizza restaurants, literary reviews, films and television awards than the author himself.

Often imitated but never matched, Hernández is credited with the neat consolidation of Argentina’s most important literary genre in a perfect example of gauchesque writing. Whilst Argentine authors continued to experiment with gauchesque writing, some argue that the 1810-1821 wars of independence and the 1880 constitution of the Argentine state marked the opening and closure of the genre – making Hernández not only the greatest writer of the genre but also one of the last.

English language translations of ‘Martin Fierro The Gaucho’ and ‘The return of Martin Fierro’ are available for download at sparrowthorn.com