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Editor's Note:
Impressed by the power of post-WWII neo-realist Italian Cinema, in the mid-1950s filmmaker Fernando Birri embarked on a project to document the daily life of a small, impoverished town in his native Argentina. The result of that project was the ground-breaking film `Tire Die,' which revealed the hardships and humanity of Latin America's rural poor. As film critic B. Ruby Rich has written, `Tire Die' "was the spark that ignited a continent and led to a decade of revolutionary cinema." Several years later Birri directed the fictional film `Los inundados,' which addressed many of the same issues of underdevelopment, but this time with a warmth and humor that signaled Birri's arrival as one of the most important filmmakers of his era. `Los inundados' was screened at the 1962 Venice Film Festival, where it was awarded Best First Film. LAVA is pleased to announce that this indispensable classic is now available for the first time on video with English subtitles.
To order any of these videos, contact us by email at info@lavavideo.org, by phone 212-243-4804, or by fax 212-243-2007. Our website, 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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Flooded, The Get Details and Purchasing Info
Fernando Birri
Feature 87 minutes 1961
With English subtitles
The Flooded (Los inundados) was Birri’s first feature film, made with an unheard of mix of professional and natural actors and also with a very noticeable taste for social documentary — it was shot during the flooding devastation of an underdeveloped area in Argentina. It shows great narrative skills and a very human, warm sense of picaresque humor centered on its humble characters. A whole family (including the dog) loses their home and takes provisional refuge in an empty stockcar. A new odyssey starts for the occupants when (by chance?) the locomotive is coupled to the stockcar, dragging it towards an uncertain destiny. A satirical tone is used to depict the hypocrisy of politicians, and a different one to show the main characters's resilience and ingenuity for surviving. Four decades after it was filmed, “Los inundados” keeps intact its freshness, enthusiasm, and fighting spirit for social justice that were the film’s inspirational strength.—Jorge Ruffinelli, Stanford University
Purchase Price: $ 150.00
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
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