Argentine filmmaker Adolfo Aristarain dies at 82

The Argentine filmmaker and winner of two Goya Awards Adolfo Aristarain died this Sunday in Buenos Aires at the age of 82, as reported by the Spanish Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences.

Aristarain (Buenos Aires, 1943) lived for seven years in Spain, where he filmed some of his most notable works, thus developing a link with Spanish cinema. This led him to win the Goya for Best Ibero-American Film for ‘A Place in the World’ and Best Adapted Screenplay for ‘Places Common’.

Likewise, he received the Gold Medal from the Film Academy in 2024. “Cinema is a ruthlessly treacherous profession for those who practice it. Even if one tries to hide what one is, sooner or later the director unintentionally exposes his soul in the foreground. The cinema one makes is what one is,” he said then.

In a statement, the Film Academy remembered him as a “key creator for the Argentine and Spanish filmographies of recent decades.” “Aristarain belongs to a generation that experienced cinema: they fell in love with fantastic women, they felt like heroes, they were able to lie and murder without punishment,” the institution noted.

Born in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Paque Chas, cinema came into his life very early through the films he saw when he left school in the continuous session rooms.

He established himself as a filmmaker working on filming as a creditor, sound engineer, editor, production assistant, assistant director, and even stood in front of the camera in ‘Dar la cara’, a film by José Martínez Suárez.

He assisted his great friend Mario Camus in directing, with whom he would also write scripts; as well as Vicente Aranda, Sergio Leone, Lewis Gilbert, Gordon Flemyng and Sergio Renán, among others. Additionally, he worked with Kathy Saavedra, who has participated in almost all of his stories.

Devotee of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, Aristarain has told vitalistic, evocative, sensitive, brilliant stories with the faces of prominent actors such as Federico Luppi, José Sacristán, Mercedes Sampietro, Eusebio Poncela, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Cecilia Roth, Juan Diego Botto and Susú Pecoraro.

The author of ‘Time of Revancha’, ‘The Law of the Border’, ‘Martín (Hache)’, and ‘Roma’ – his latest production – is the first Argentine director to receive the Gold Medal from the Film Academy “for being one of the fundamental names in the history of cinema in Spanish, an outstanding representative of the fundamental Argentine cinema, which has contributed so much to our cinematography.”

A distinction that he understood had a lot to do with friendship and his way of being, which was a much more personal Medal than an award for his films.