Argentinean to showcase film at UH --Director to hold question and answer session for Latino American week

By Ansley Brown Ka Leo Staff Writer April 14, 2003

Director Fernando Birri, an early pioneer of the new Latin American cinema movement, will visit the University of Hawai'i tomorrow for a screening of his 1988 film, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings."

During the 1950s, he studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Roma where he was greatly influenced by the cinematic style of Italian neorealism.

Birri was in California for three months and agreed to visit Hawai'i at the request of Paul Schroeder, UH Manoa assistant professor of Spanish.

Birri's appearance is part of a series of lectures and presentations during II Latino American Week, which runs from April 14 to April 30. The events are sponsored by the Spanish division of the Languages and Literatures of Europe and the Americas at UH.

The film will be shown in Kuykendall Hall 101 and a question and answer session will follow. The event is free and open to the public.

Upon returning to Argentina, Birri was determined to create a national cinematic style based on a more realistic portrayal of Argentine life. He met with industry resistance and so returned to Santa Fe where he began teaching a class in experimental film, which later became a complete cinema school.

Some of the best known features from the school include the documentary "Tire die" (1954) and a neorealist feature film "Los Innundados" (1961.) Both films centered on Argentine social classes that had been traditionally ignored. In the early 1960s, Birri fled Argentina and ended up living in Italy, making few films, until the late 70s when he returned to Latin America and resumed his teaching career in Mexico and Venezuela.

In 1986, he was appointed the head of the International Film School in Havana, Cuba. In 1997, he received a lifetime achievement award at the International Documentary Film Festival of Leipzig. Today, Birri splits his time between Buenos Aires, Rome and Cuba.

Nobel Laureate recipient Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings." Marquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982 for his novels and short stories. He is the author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera."

The movie takes place amid the debris of a Colombian cyclone, in which a very old man with enormous wings has landed. His miraculous anatomy attracts the curious and devout from around the world. The onlookers wait for this silent and fantastical creature's heavenly message, which turns out to be a very mixed blessing.