Renowned Argentinean Director to Visit Hawaii

Fernando Birri to present film screening and Q&A session at UH Manoa

University of Hawaiʻi
Contact:
Paul Schroeder, (808) 956-5973
Assistant Professor of Spanish
Kristen Cabral, (808) 956-5039
Public Information Officer
Posted: Apr 2, 2003


Renowned Argentinean director Fernando Birri is visiting Hawaiʻi and will be in attendance at a screening of his 1988 film, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," on Tuesday, April 15, at 10:30 a.m. in Kuykendall Hall 101 at UH Mānoa. The screening will be followed by a question and answer session with Birri, and the event is free and open to the public.

As a young man, Fernando Birri studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, where he met and worked as an assistant to such great neo-realist directors as Vittorio de Sica and Cesare Zavattini. On his return to Argentina, he founded the Film Institute of the National University of the Litoral, in Santa Fe, and directed "Los Inundados," a delightful picaresque that won him the Best First Work Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1961.

In 1982, Birri founded the Laboratorio Ambulante de Poeticas, a mobile film school that he took to Spain, Italy, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Nicaragua, and throughout the Argentine countryside. Four years later he co-founded the International School of Film and TV in Cuba, and in 1997 received a lifetime achievement award at the International Documentary Film Festival of Leipzig.

For more information about the event, contact Paul Schroeder in the Department of Languages and Literatures of Europe and the Americas at (808) 956-5973.