CUBAN FILM SCHOOL RETROSPECTIVE

ZA 05 = THE OLD AND THE NEW

(ZA 05. LO VIEJO Y LO NUEVO)

Argentina/Cuba, 1977, 77 min. Spanish

Director: Fernando Birri
Producer: Rolando Pardo, Daniela Speranza
Script: Fernando Birri, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio García Espinoza, Orlando Senna
Editing: Fabio Pallero
Sound: Jerónimo Labrada
Print Source:
Fernando Birri
Via Giovanni Borracco 12
Roma
Italy


ZA 2005 = THE OLD AND THE NEW

This is a fascinating filmed homage to legendary vanguard, poet and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini and the mind behind such Italian Neorealist films as The Bicycle Thief, (Ladrón de bicicleta) and Miracle in Milan (Milagro en Milán). Composed by Fernando Birri, the founder of EICTV, ZA 2005 combines sequences from over 4400 student thesis films shot between 1986 and 2005. Though the students hail from over 45 countries across the world, they are linked by a common muse: Zavattini and their films reflect and comment upon the legendary filmmaker’s ideology. More than a collage of Zavattini fan testimonies however, this artsy mosaic also pays tribute to fifty years of New Latin American Cinema.

Fernando Birri was born in Santa Fe, Argentina in 1925. He is a renowned film director and theoretician, and before he entered the world of cinema he worked in the worlds of theater, poetry and puupetry. In the early 1950s he studied at the experimental cinema center in Rome. There he finished his studies at the Rome Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. He shot his first documentary film Selimunte in Sicily.
In 1956 he founded and directed the Institute of Cinematography at the Littoral University in Argentina, from which emerged the documentary School of Santa Fe with a different and unique vision of the country´s reality. There he created one of the most acclaimed Latin American films of all time, tire die, a documentary that denounced the ominous living conditions of a town on the edge of Santa Fe.
In 1982 he founded the Laboratory of cinematographic poetics in the University of the Andes in Venezuela. In 1984 he was elected as an honored member of the Committee of Filmmakers of Latin America. He was the founder of Foundation of New Latin American Cinema and a member of its executive committee and was also a founder, (with Nobel prizewinning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and first director of the EICTV, the Interbation Filmand Television School at San Antonio de Los Banos, Cuba. Birri is known as the "Father of the New Latin American Cinema"

Filmography (selected):

Za 05. The Old and the New (2006);
Che: Death of Utopia? (1999);
Century of the Wind (1999);
Entangling Shadows (1998);
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings (1998);
Org (1978);
Che. Buenos Aires (1962);
Flooded Out (1961);
Tire die (1960);
Good Morning (1959).

FRIDAY, APRIL 6 AT 7:00 PM./GALLERY THEATRE