Fernando E. Solanas was an Argentine director born in Olivos, Buenos Aires, co-founder of the Third Cinema movement and one of Latin America's most politically radical filmmakers. The Hour of the Furnaces, a nearly four-hour documentary essay made clandestinely under military dictatorship, became the movement's foundational text, arguing for a revolutionary cinema opposed to both Hollywood spectacle and European auteurism. Tangos, the Exile of Gardel and The South, made after years of political exile in France, turned toward more personal, tango-infused fictional storytelling about displacement and return. Social Genocide, a later documentary indictment of Argentina's economic collapse, confirmed his lifelong commitment to explicitly political filmmaking. Solanas later served as an Argentine senator, extending into politics the activism that had always defined his cinema. Read more