“My thing was always to have fun making films,” said Adolfo Aristarain, one of the most prominent Argentine directors, shortly before receiving the Gold Medal from the Spanish Film Academy in 2024. It was his last public appearance. Aristarain died this Sunday, at the age of 82, as sources close to him confirmed to EL PAÍS.
“Cinema is a ruthlessly treacherous profession for those who practice it,” he said upon receiving the medal. “Although 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 added.
The director of classics like filmed in the middle of the Argentine military dictatorship, and was a cultural bridge between Argentina and Spain, which he considered his country of training, where he lived between 1967 and 1974 and with which he maintained a great bond for the rest of his life.
The Spanish Film Academy described him this Sunday as part of a “generation that lived cinema.” “They fell in love with fantastic women, they felt like heroes, they were able to lie and murder without punishment… Cinema is part of their life, it is real, it is not fiction,” the institution said when saying goodbye to him in a statement.
Aristarain told vitalistic and sensitive stories with actors such as Federico Luppi, Cecilia Roth, José Sacristán, Mercedes Sampietro, Eusebio Poncela, Juan Diego Botto and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, to name a few for whom he felt adoration.
Born in Buenos Aires on October 19, 1943, Aristarain was a voracious film buff since his childhood. A devotee of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock and self-taught, he first approached the seventh art as an editor, sound engineer and production assistant. He did whatever it took to see how movies were made.
He began his work as assistant director in Buenos Aires and soon continued it in Madrid. He was under the orders of Mario Camus in Whatever they say, premiered in 1968, and from then on, encouraged by the rise of the spaghetti westernmoved to Almería. He also attended Vicente Aranda, Sergio Leone, Lewis Gilbert, Gordon Flemyng and Sergio Renán.
He returned to his hometown in 1974 and made his directorial debut four years later with The lion’s share. It was the first in a long list of films in which he combined suspense and police plots with a critical look at reality and which made him one of the greatest names in Argentine cinema.
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