Biography
Argentine film director and theoretician Fernando Birri (March 13, 1925 – December 27, 2017), whom Colombian novelist and Nobel Prize recipient Gabriel García Márquez calls Gran papá del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, was one of the founders of the new Latin American film movement, often described as a form of revolutionary or Third Cinema.
Before entering the world of cinema, Birri worked in poetry, theater, and puppetry. During the 1950s he traveled to Italy, where his parents were born, and studied filmmaking at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia di Roma where he was greatly influenced by the style of the Italian Neorealists and in particular the work of Vittorio de Sica and Cesare Zavattini, for whom he worked as assistant director in his film Il tetto (“The Roof”). In 1951, he shot his first documentary film Selimunte in Sicily.
Upon returning to Argentina, Birri was determined to create a national cinematic style based on a more realistic portrayal of the fringes of Argentine society. In his native Santa Fe he began teaching a class in experimental film that later evolved into a complete cinema school – the Instituto de Cinematografía de la Universidad del Litoral. There he filmed the documentary Tire dié (1954), and a neorealist feature film Los inundados (1961). Both films centered on the Argentine lower social classes and denounced their conditions.
A military regime of political repression in the early 1960s forced Birri into exile, residing briefly in Brazil and later settling in Italy until the late 1970s. Upon returning to Latin America, he resumed his cinematic and educational projects, founding the mobile poetic film school Laboratorio Ambulante de Poéticas Cinematográficas at the Universidad de los Andes in Venezuela. Together with Gabriel García Márquez, he founded the Escuela de Cine y Televisión de Tres Mundos (EICTV) in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba in 1986. In the same year he directed My Son Che, a film portrait based on an interview with Che Guevara’s father, Don Ernesto Guevara Lynch. Two years later, in collaboration with García Márquez, he filmed Un señor muy viejo con unas las muy grandes (“A Very Old Man with Very Large Wings”), which premiered in the United States at the Sundance Film Festival.
In 1995, Birri produced a documentary film for German television entitled Süden, Süden, Süden (“South, South, South”), followed in 1998 by El siglo del viento: un noticiero latinoamericano (“The Century of the Wind: A Newscast from Latin America”), a film based on Eduardo Galeanos’s trilogy Memoria del fuego.
Birri continued his cinematic career in the 21st century. In 2007, he filmed a documentary entitled Elegía Friulana, homage to his grandfather, Giambatista, anarchist bricklayer, peasant and miller who left Italy in search for a better life in South America. His last feature film was shot on location in the pampa litoral region of Argentina — El Fausto criollo, an adaptation of the poem by Estanislao del Campo from 1856. He also worked on two productions — Mal d’America, co-written with the famous Italian novelist Vasco Pratolini, and Gaucho Pampa, a mito-film (mythical film).
Fernando Birri authored numerous books on film theory and poetry. He was a founder of the Fundación del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano and a Member of Honor of its Executive Board. He was a Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford University in 2001-2002, and a visiting professor at Tufts University in 2009. Birri has been honored at numerous film festivals around the world.
Fernando Birri passed away on December 27, 2017, in Rome, Italy, at the age of 92, leaving behind a legacy that continues to influence Latin American cinema.