Hector Babenco

At the age of 70, the Argentine-born Brazilian filmmaker Héctor Babenco has died of a heart attack. Nominated for an Oscar for best director for “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” its lead actor William Hurt did win the coveted statuette for his performance in this film.

Héctor Babenco was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and would be nationalized in Brazil, but it can be said that he was from everywhere. The original spelling of his last name was Babenko, and his Jewish roots traced back to Poland and the Ukraine.

Trained in the documentary, and with barely a dozen titles to his credit, his was an extreme and visceral cinema, not at all self-congratulatory, which painted degraded environments, and denounced misery and marginalization. He had an impact in 1981 with Pixote , about street children, although his consecration came four years later with The Kiss of the Spider Woman , a prison drama with homosexuality and harassment for this condition as main themes, a film that adapted a work by Manuel Puig and had several Oscar nominations, one of which became a statuette for the lead actor, William Hurt . In Brazil, Carandiru (2003) would also have a great impact on the painful situation of prisons in that country.

Of course, the Hollywood call did not go unnoticed, so Babenco directed Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson in Tallo de hierro (1987), where he remained faithful to at least thematic issues of social significance by portraying two homeless men. While Playing in the Lord’s Fields (1991), with Kathy Bates incarnating a fanatical Protestant missionary, was a failed approach to the way in which European civilizations, and specifically the evangelists, affected the indigenous people of the Amazon.

Curiously, the film that closes his filmography, My Hindu Friend (2015), starring Willem Dafoe , followed the path of a terminally ill film director.