Santa Fe celebrates Fernando Birri: films, exhibitions, and his digitalized legacy

The anniversary marked a day in the year: March 13 marked the centenary of the birth of Fernando Birri , the director of Tire dié and other works that laid the foundations for social cinema in Argentina. But the celebration extends into 2025 with an ambitious program by the Ministry of Culture of the province of Santa Fe, which includes screenings, exhibitions, television documentaries, and an archive aimed at restoring and disseminating the heritage of the great filmmaker who never forgot his place in the world: the city of Santa Fe.

Birri (Santa Fe, 1925 – Rome, 2017) was also a puppeteer, writer, visual artist, film theorist, and professor . This diverse career is contained in the Archive that bears his name and is composed of " more than 400 boxes of papers, drawings, photographs, posters, letters, script versions, and another hundred boxes of audiovisual material in various formats," according to Paulo Ricci, Secretary of Cultural Development of Santa Fe.

The material was donated by Birri himself to the province of Santa Fe and shipped in a container from Rome. The filmmaker's legacy also included his house in the town of San José del Rincón , where the Sapukay Cultural Space, under the Santa Fe Ministry of Culture, currently operates. "The donation was formalized in 2020 with Carmen Papio, Fernando's widow. We are organizing the archive with the project of converting it into the Santa Fe Film Library," Ricci adds.

The 100 Years of Birri Agenda , as the program is called, includes, among other activities, a traveling heritage exhibition ; the premiere of the television series "Las alas de Birri" ( Birri's Wings) and interviews with filmmakers, technicians, and students who worked with Birri; a series of screenings of the filmmaker's filmography in Santa Fe and Rosario; a painting exhibition co-produced with Brown University (USA); and the digitalization of the film collection of the Film Institute founded by Birri himself at the National University of Litoral.

There will also be joint activities with the Cinemateca of Rio de Janeiro and the San Antonio de los Baños Film and Television School in Cuba , founded by Birri in 1986.

"The idea is that the centennial won't just be a ceremonial event, but rather that it will allow us to launch activities, research, and public initiatives to raise awareness of the work and expand knowledge. March 13th was the beginning: we'll have many stops and milestones with activities and launches," promises Ricci.

Fernando Birri grew up in a family of painters, draftsmen, and musicians . His father, of the same name, worked as a notary and was also a cartoonist and art critic, and his paternal uncles formed part of a traditional tango quartet. At the age of ten, shortly after his mother's death, he achieved the first milestone in his artistic career by setting up the puppet theater El Retablillo de Maese Pedro in a shed at his home.

The theater's name paid homage to a character from Don Quixote de la Mancha. Wearing an eye patch and a monkey slung over his shoulder, Maese Pedro was a puppeteer who ran a portable puppet theater. "Somewhat imitating La Barraca, Federico García Lorca's traveling theater in Republican Spain, we would go out to visit various places in the region, first in Santa Fe and then in the Litoral region: schools, nursing homes, orphanages, prisons, mental asylums, neighborhood and recreational associations," Birri recalled in an interview. Performances could take place in the most unexpected places : "Under a bridge, in public squares, in the middle of the street, on a soccer field, on a dance floor."

Birri moved to Rome for the first time in 1950. He studied at the Centro Experimental de Cinematografía, during the years of consecration of Italian neorealism , and upon returning to Santa Fe around 1956 he founded the Instituto de la Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Between that year and 1958, he made the short film Tire dié with the first group of students, a “filmed social survey” with the inhabitants of a village that was periodically under the waters of the Salado River.

The title takes from a phrase that is so characteristic of the slum's youth, the way they begged passengers on the Mitre Railway, which passed through the area across a two-kilometer bridge. The filming was part of a kind of epic, as Birri recalled: "The Institute had practically no resources. We made the film with two borrowed cameras and film that they gave us , on the one hand, or that we got the University to buy for us, on the other. We used a completely non-professional recorder."

Tire dié established the Santa Fe Film Institute's reputation as a documentary film school , which also claimed to be the first of its kind in Latin America; Birri's debut feature, Los inundados (1960–1961), cemented that status and won the award for best debut film at the Venice International Film Festival.

Tire dié premiered on September 27, 1958, in the auditorium of the National University of Litoral. Santa Fe Film Week takes place every year around that date, organized by the Ministry of Culture, the National University of Litoral, and the Santa Fe Film Club. The next edition will be dedicated to Birri. "We're planning a meeting of audiovisual archives from across the country and the presentation of Fernando's film mapping," says Paulo Ricci.

The impact of Tire dié boosted the activity of the Film Institute , which counted among its teachers Simón Feldman, Juan José Saer, Hugo Gola, Salvador Samaritano and Agustín Mahieu, and where Raúl Beceyro, Marilyn Contardi, Esteban Courtalón, Jorge Goldenberg, Gustavo Moris, Luis Príamo, Nicolás Sarquis and Gerardo Vallejo, among other notable filmmakers, screenwriters and directors of photography, were trained. Birri moved again to Rome in 1963, after a decree of the National Executive Power prohibited the exhibition of Los cuarenta cuartos , a film by Juan Oliva produced at the Institute.

Oliva's film chronicled the life of a poor couple in Santa Fe , and Birri described it as a "second filmed social survey." The Film Institute produced 49 of its own films and another 29 in which some of its members participated , until it was closed in December 1975 by order of the national government. In 1985, a group of filmmakers from Santa Fe revived Birri's tradition to found the UNL Film Workshop, which has since produced 38 films.

Paulo Ricci highlights the agreement signed between the Minister of Culture, Susana Rueda, and the rector of the UNL, Enrique Mamarella, to digitize the Institute's film archive and also that of the Film Workshop: "This agreement expands Birri's personal archive with the aim of converting it into the Santafesina Film Library, where all the province's film material can be safeguarded." The recovery of the material is being led by critic, professor, and researcher Fernando Martín Peña.

The Birri Archive is under construction but is already having an impact , says Ricci: “Fernando thought of the donation at a special moment in his life, when he began to want to return even though he was still in Rome. And it also has to do with a virtuous biological cycle, with the desire for his work and the cultural history of which he was a part to return to Santa Fe. Now, what is happening to us, with the existence of the Archive, is that documents, works, and testimonies that had been dispersed for decades are being reunited.”

The complete agenda for the Birri Year can be found on the website of the Ministry of Culture of Santa Fe .