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Editor's Note:
Returning from studies in Italy in 1956, young filmmaker Fernando Birri decided to use a neo-realist cinematic language that would convey the harsh contrasts of his native Argentina. Birri founded a documentary school in Santa Fe and, with a group of his students, set out to document the daily ritual of children of a nearby poor town, who sprinted alongside the local train tracks in order to beg the passengers for money. The resulting film, Throw a Dime (Tire die), is now considered the seminal work of Latin American social documentary. Although the New Latin American Cinema is considered to have officially begun in the mid-1960s with the founding of important film festivals in Uruguay and Chile, Birri has since been recognized as an early pioneer of the movement.
To order either of these videos, contact us by email at info@lavavideo.org, by phone 212-243-4804, or by fax 212-243-2007. Our web site, www.latinamericanvideo.org, allows for secure purchases by credit card.
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The Birth of New Latin American Cinema
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Throw a Dime Get Details and Purchasing Info
Fernando Birri
Documentary 33 minutes 1958
With English subtitles
Throw a Dime (Tire dié) was a major watershed for the New Latin American Cinema, the source of a renovating movement that some years later spread throughout Latin America. With a new documentary style, the film focused on the underveloped suburbs of a city, Santa Fe, Argentina. Birri and his crew succeeded in filming a moving document about extreme poverty, and the main protagonists were children with no future. One of its main sequences — in which children run barefoot beside a train and along a very narrow and dangerous bridge begging for a dime (“tire dié”) — is one of the most memorable scenes in the visual memory of the XXth Century.— Jorge Ruffinelli, Stanford University
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
Kids in the Movie, The Get Details and Purchasing Info
Pablo Ramazza
Documentary 28 minutes 1998
With English subtitles
Forty years after the filming of the documentary classic 'Throw a Dime' by Fernando Birri, a film crew returns to the town of Santa Fe in search of the children who ran alongside the train begging for coins. The poverty of the region has barely changed, but the trains no longer run and Santa Fe's residents now search for alternate means of survival.
Purchase Price: $ 99.95
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