Fernando “Pino” Solanas was a giant of world cinema and arguably Latin America’s most celebrated filmmaker of the twentieth century. His passing on November 6, 2020 was mourned by the international film community and by countless activists on the Latin American left, many of whom had experienced their first political awakening as youths watching “Pino’s” radical agitprop films.

Director of over twenty feature films and documentaries, a lifelong political activist, and occasional left-wing politician, Solanas will forever be remembered as the father of Third Cinema, the radical Latin American filmmaking movement of the 1960s and ’70s that sought to turn the camera into a weapon of the revolution.

Pino was born on February 16, 1936, in the well-to-do neighborhood of Olivos in the greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area. Like many other middle-class youth in Argentina, Pino came of age politically during the years of the so-called Peronist Resistance — the period following the populist leader’s forced exile in 1955 that saw increased radicalization among Juan Domingo Perón’s working-class base.