Fernando Birri

He was considered the father of the new Latin American cinema, close to neorealism, to which he gave his own features. Pedagogue and filmmaker, he had been the founder of the prestigious San Antonio de Baños International Film School in Cuba. He has died in Rome at the age of 92 years.

Born in Santa Fe in 1925, his appearance in recent times with his bushy white beard gave him the air of a prophet, and he assumed a function of this style in Ibero-American cinema.

With artistic concerns from a young age, and with a family of Italian origin, he moved to Rome in 1950 to study film at the Cinecittà Experimental Film Center. He brought behind him a creative experience as a poet and puppeteer. Among the friendships that he made at that time, and that will mark him, are those of the filmmakers Julio García Espinosa and Tomas Gutiérrez Alea and that of the writer Gabriel García Márquez .

He returns to Santa Fe in 1956, when he wants to develop a vocation in the world of teaching, transmitting what he has learned in Italy, especially in relation to the neorealist current, it is worth telling stories anchored in authenticity, and that make the reality of Ibero-America known, a true social cinema. So he founded the Institute of Cinematography of the National University of the Coast. There he made his first documentary, Tire Dié , which would be followed by other emblematic titles such as Los inundados and La pampa gringa . He would also adapt a short story by the Colombian writer, A very old man with enormous wings .

Later, with García Márquez, he would found the San Antonio de Baños International Film and Television School in Cuba. There, when the news of his death was known, they wrote gratefully: “The word founder is perhaps the one that best defines you. Like every founder, you were, you are, as sane as you were crazy: you exercised an irreverence committed to the destiny of the peoples and the arts of this continent; you acted from a lucidity that allowed you to see beyond and more here than the common mortals; you managed to dislodge bourgeois and bureaucrats with the same perseverance; you fought with the weapons of imagination against dogmatists and opportunists; you dreamed and shaped what to others might seem impossible,

In 2008 Birri donated all of his work, including film and writing, to the archive of the Brown University Library, associated with the Rhode Island School of Design in the United States.