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.............***** FERNANDO BIRRI *****

Photo courtesy of Jorge Ruffinelli

Fernando Birri was born in 1925 in Santa Fe, Argentina.
At a very young age he started writing poetry, then he continued experimenting with theater and film. In 1950 Birri went to Italy, where he graduated from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografía, directing his first documentary film Selinute. Six years later, Birri returned to his native Santa Fe to found and direct the Instituto de Cinematografía de la Universidad Nacional del Litoral. It was in Santa Fe where he filmed the first Latin American survey of social criticism, Tire dié (Toss a dime), an exemplary incursion into a new national, realistic, critical and popular cinema.

Fernando Birri's 1961 film Los inundados (The Flooded Ones), a humoristic and ironic story about a northern Argentinian town's flooding, received an award at the 1963 Venice Biennal. As Peron assumed Argentina's presidency, Birri was forced to leave the country and gathered this experience in the book La escuela documental de Santa Fe (Documentary School of Santa Fe), a work against the cinematographic underdevelopment in Latin America.

Before returning to Argentina, in 1982, Birri founded the Laboratorio de Poéticas Cinematográficas in the Department of Film at the Universidad de Los Andes in Venezuela. Three years later, in 1985, Birri's was again present in his country's cultural life after a 22 year absence with the seminar Memoria y futuro: La Escuela Documental de Santa Fe y el Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano. (Memory and future: The Documentary School of Santa Fe and the New Latin American Cinema). This was a return to his origins as a filmmaker and as a mentor for new film students. The following year Birri, Colombia's Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Garcia Espinosa, and other filmmakers co-founded the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión de Tres Mundos in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba.

In 1996 Birri produced a film for Germany's television: Süden, Süden, Süden" (Preguntas) Opulencia y Miseria. His lastest film, produced in 1998 and based in texts of Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, is entitled El siglo del viento: un noticiero Latinoamericano.

Birri has also authored books about Latin American film and poetry. He is founder of the Fundación del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano and is a member of its Executive Board. He has been honored at numerous international film festivals, most recently at 45th San Francisco Film Festival in San Francisco, California, where he received the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award.

Fernando Birri was the Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford Uiniversity during the 2001-2002 academic year and he taught a seminar on Latin American film. More recently, Fernando Birri has received the 'Tatú-Tumpá' award for his contributions to Latin American cinematography at the Festival Iberoamericano de Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia.