This year the 3rd Discovering Latin America Film Festival in association with DocHouse is thrilled to receive the world-renown Argentinean filmmaker Fernando ‘Pino’ Solanas. For this special occasion, his powerful documentary film Memorias del Saqueo (A Social Genocide) will be screened at a Gala Night followed by an interview by Gareth Evans from Time Out.

Born in Buenos Aires in February 1936, Fernando “Pino” Solanas, a trained musician,made a name for himself during the mid-sixties for his work on a documentary trilogy entitled The Hour of the Furnaces and gained a reputation as a champion of the “cinema of decolonization”. The repressive measures of the military dictatorship in Argentina forced the director into exile in Paris in the mid 1970s. During this period he made Le Regard des autres (1980) and Tangos, el exilio de Gardel (Tangos, The Exile of Gardel) (1985). In the mid 1980s Fernando Solanas returned to Argentina; he continued to examine the country as well as South America in El Sur (The South) (1988), El Viaje (The Journey) (1992) and La Nube (The Cloud) (1998). However Solanas’ films are not the only testimony of his political commitment: from 1993 to 1997 he was also a member of the Argentinean parliament – although as soon as his term was over, he returned to filmmaking.

In his latest documentary Memorias del Saqueo, Fernando Solanas addresses recent Argentinean crises as well as the impact of neo-liberal politics and globalization. The film uses interviews and archive material to shed light on topics like corruption and the squandering of public funds. “With its vivid coverage”, director Solanas explains, “my film aims at contributing to the urgent and indispensable discussion under way in my country, in Latin America, in the entire world, on the inhumanity of globalization”. At the same time the film aspires to prove that another world is possible.