Prominent film director and writer, Federico E. Solanas, a.k.a. Pino Solanas, combines his passion for the theater, music, and comics with his political and social engagement. Together with Octavio Getino and Fernando Vallejo, he founded the Argentine Cine-Liberation group in the late 1960s through which he made a documentation trilogy entitled La hora de los fornos about protests against the neocolonialism and violence that characterized Latin America at the time. The film became a reference point for South American political-protest cinema. The trilogy was shown in over 60 countries. Following a lengthy interview with Juan Domingo Perón, Solanas completed his first fiction feature Los Hijos de Fierro (1975). Though forced to go into exile in Spain then France, he continued making films in a poetic manner about his home country. The film Tangos, el exilio de Gardel (1984), accompanied by Astor Piazzolla’s music, is the story of how several Argentine artists in exile attempted to stage a show in his honor. This was followed by Sur (1988), winner of the Golden Palm at Cannes, an intimate journey into the life of a victim of the Argentine dictatorship, and by El viaje (1992), a young man’s search for his father against the backdrop of the political and economic upheaval in Argentina at the time. He won the Golden Bear award for career in 2004. Since then he has devoted his talents to documentary filmmaking: Memoria del saqueo (2003), a film cycle about Argentina, La dignidad de los nadies (2005), Argentina latente (2007), La próxima estación (2008), La Tierra Sublevada: Oro Negro (2009 - 2010), and La guerra del fracking (2013). The endless expanses of South America and its endless economic crises are portrayed in all its contradictions, complexities, and tragedies, revealing its true character.
