Fernando Birri

Mario Verdone: Il critico viaggiatore

Tie Your Plow to a Star

In 1997 the Argentine filmmaker Fernando Birri returned to his home country to film a documentary on the 30th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara and the relevance of utopias at that time. Carmen Guarini decided to record those moments. A rough edit of this film was hidden away on a fragile VHS tape for twenty years. Today, these images come to life and shed some light on the life of this Latin American poet and master filmmaker, who, at the age of 92, still refused to give up on his own utopias.

BirriLata, Around by Train

Few people in Argentine and Latin American cinema have been as close as Fernando Birri to stand as a patriarch, pioneer, and spokesman for a committed cinema that tears itself apart in its solidarity with its own surroundings. This ode to the tireless Birri presents him to us in full: teaching, establishing standards, and creating with the tools of his time, turning culture into a form of political affirmation as he grows more and more vital and rooted.

Vanishing landscapes

A mockumentary about three young student filmmakers as they make a movie about an alleged film director living obscurely in a Buenos Aires mental hospital. In their visits to the mental hospital, the three students will forge a very special relationship with the self-styled former film director as they follow different clues and strategies to discover his 'true' identity.

Fernando Birri, el utópico andante

Documentary film about Argentinian filmmaker Fernando Birri. An interview: a journey through documentary filmmaking, his childhood, the dawning of New Latin American cinema...

El Fausto Criollo

A version of El Estatola del Campo's poetic Faust of the Poet (1886) integrates the major trilogy of Argentine gaucho poetry, is proposed here in a faithful version and integral.

Glauber Rocha - The Movie, Brazil's Labyrinth

Documentary about Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha, one of the most important names in the Cinema Novo, with interviews with some of his friends and colleagues.

Rocha Que Voa

Documentary about the relationship between filmmaker Glauber Rocha and Cuba.

Historias Breves II: Trece Segundos

What goes through someone's mind 13 seconds before they die? A town lost in the year 40. Different characters in their common actions. Two men lying in the street, one dead, the other playing dead. Between reality and the delusions of his mind we travel through his last thirteen seconds of life.

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

An elderly man with wings is blown off course during a tropical storm in this symbolic fantasy. The Old Man lands near a Caribbean island where a poor family gives him shelter in a chicken coop. Father Gonzaga is the skeptical priest who rushes to damn the creature. Soon the Old Man is the subject of curiosity seekers as Elisinda and Pelayo start charging admission. A traveling carnival of human oddities camps near the Old Man as people flock to see the show. The Old Man is reduced to being an unwanted pet, and after six years, he mends his wings and flies away. Nudity, simulated sex with a spider woman, and the ugliness of human exploitation definitely put this fantasy in a category not for children.

The Compass Rose

Exiled Chilean director Patricio Guzmán filmed in Cuba and in Venezuela to create this controversial statement on the creation and survival of Latin American culture from the late-15th century to the present. For some viewers, the film will be superficially symbolic and rhetorical, for others, it will be a strong and personal vision of several centuries of history.

Compañero Fernando

This documentary is a portrait made in Mexico by a group of Argentine exiles, directed by the painter Nicolás Amoroso.

Dar la cara

Three boys from very different backgrounds who have just finished their military service must face the complex social reality of Argentina.

Abandoned

A group of rich young intellectuals hiding from the war in rural Italy play at being partisans when some disbanded soldiers and some refugees ask them for shelter in their villa. The young and aristocratic Andrea strikes up a friendship with a peasant girl, Lucia. Then the Germans suddenly appear, looking for the real partisans, and the time comes for serious decisions.

Attila

Attila, the leader of the barbarian Huns and called by the Romans "The Scourge of God", sweeps onto the Italian peninsula, defeating all of the armies of Rome, until he and his men reach the gates of the city itself.

Ho ritrovato mio figlio

A young boy, about to take his first communion, must wrestle with his familial loyalty and his conscience when there is a fire at their local cinema where his brother works and it is clear that he is involved in the theft of the projector. Determined to right the wrong done by his sibling, he attempts to make amends.

The Cheerful Squadron

The Cheerful Squadron is a 1954 Italian war-comedy film directed by Paolo Moffa and Interpreted by movie stars like Paolo Stoppa, Vittorio De Sica, Alberto Sordi and Silvana Pampanini. Based on the military environment novel The Allegro Squadron by Georges Courteline (1886), this film presents a series of sketches on military life in the late nineteenth century.

untitled (Document No. 1)(Helmut Waldemar / Winchester Banz)

A tribute to German film critic and cinema activist Helmut W. Banz made with outtakes from two features by Jürgen Heiter. Banz as an explorer, as a loner and as a friend, as a charmer and as a recluse – a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.