Marco Bechis

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Marco Bechis (born October 24, 1955 in Santiago de Chile ) is an Italian - Chilean film director and screenwriter . He has been working together for many years with his fellow writer Lara Fremder , with whom he has written the scripts for his feature films since his feature film debut Alambrado (1991).

biography

Marco Bechis was born in 1955 (according to other information 1957) to a Chilean woman of French-Swiss descent and an Italian. Later, his family moved to Argentina Buenos Aires . In 1976 the government was overthrown in Argentina and a military dictatorship was established under Jorge Rafael Videla . The idealistic Bechis, at that time working as a left-wing activist and elementary school teacher in the Argentine capital, was thinking of continuing his teaching activities in the disadvantaged regions of the country when he was arrested by four civilian soldiers in April 1977 and placed in one of the numerous secret ones Torture camp was abducted. Bechis was housed there blindfolded and 160 other prisoners, who today are among the many " disappeared " under the military junta. He had to endure fifty interrogations and was tortured with electric shocks before being released after ten days under pressure from his parents. They had turned to General Guillermo Suárez Mason . Bechis was then transferred to a normal prison. Three months later he emigrated to Italy , where he also received Italian citizenship.

Bechis has lived in Milan since the early 1980s . Further stays abroad took him to Los Angeles and Paris, among others . In New York he worked as a photographer and video artist and in 1982, in collaboration with the human rights organization Amnesty International, created the video installation Desaparecidos , in which he confronted the atrocities of the Argentine military dictatorship and his own experiences for the first time. From 1981 Bechis studied at the Milanese film school Albedo and in 1982 presented Mi sembra d'averlo gia 'visto, his first 40-minute film on 16 mm . Two years later he won a prize at the Northern Italian festival of Salsomaggiore Terme for the seven-minute video-produced Absent (1984) . This was followed by further works on 16 mm format with Esterno tango (1987) and Storie metropolitane (1988). Bechis first made his breakthrough as a filmmaker in 1991 with his feature film debut Alambrado , for which he wrote the script together with Lara Fremder. At the center of the drama that takes place in Argentina is a couple trying to prevent the construction of a tourist airport. The Argentine-Italian co-production has been shown at several international film festivals, was featured in the 1991 Locarno Film Festival competition and in 1993 brought the Italian director a third place in the feature film section of the Havana Film Festival .

After the first success as a filmmaker Bechis wrote with stranger the screenplay for Maurizio Zaccaros award-winning Italian war drama Il carniere (1997) and processed with the documentary Luca's film the AIDS -death his Milanese friend Luca Pizzorno in 1994. In addition to photographs, the life of the tracing the sculptor and photographer, the film also documents the scattering of the ashes by Bechis and two friends in accordance with Buddhist tradition in India . Also of autobiographical origin was the feature film Junta , produced in 1999 , in which a young student (played by Antonella Costa ) was abducted by the secret police during the Argentine military dictatorship and suddenly faced with her shy roommate ( Carlos Echevarría ), who was in love with her , an "interrogation “Specialists. Junta became Bechis' most successful film to date, won 17 international film and festival awards and earned the Italian, among other things, the Cóndor de Plata for best director, Argentina's national film award. In Germany, on the other hand, the Italian-Argentine-French co-production took four years to find a distributor, but it also received praise from the critics. The Süddeutsche Zeitung praised Junta as one of the “most gripping and artistically convincing films” ever dedicated to this topic, and praised Bechis for the virtuoso lighting of his subtle pictures, which never directly show the horrors of torture and killings. the daily newspaper in turn also pointed to Bechi's sober gaze, which would achieve “moments of clarity”. For Bechis himself, who decided to shoot Junta in 1995 after a trip to Bosnia , the film represented “a kind of film manifesto without time and place”.

In 2001, with Figli / Hijos , Bechis again successfully devoted himself to coming to terms with the Argentine and his own past and again entrusted his junta actor Carlos Echevarría with the leading role. In the drama, Echevarría plays the son of an Argentine exile living in Italy. It was only through an unknown twin sister living in Buenos Aires that he realized that he was adopted as a newborn by a pilot in the Argentine Air Force, who made numerous opponents of the military regime, including his biological mother, disappear over the sea. While Bechis' Figli / Hijos was shown outside of the competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2001, it competed for the Golden Lion with BirdWatchers - La terra degli uomini rossi (English: bird watchers - the land of the red people ) in 2008 . The drama is set in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul and focuses on a group of Guarani Kaiowa Indians who, after the suicide of two teenagers, leave their reservation and settle next to a landowner's field. The director became aware of the subject through the aid organization Survival International , which was located in the immediate vicinity of Bechi's Milanese home.

Birdwatchers received high praise from the critics, for which the director relied almost exclusively on amateur actors. In its criticism , the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was impressed by the naturalness of Guarini and Bechis' masterful narrative, while the daily newspaper spoke of a mixture of the "spheres" in which the director idealized the Indians as little as he demonized the landowners. The Italian, who appeared in Venice as a “combative moralist for the cause of the Indians”, then advanced in an otherwise rather disappointing competition together with the American Kathryn Bigelow ( Tödliches Kommando - The Hurt Locker ) and the Ethiopian Haile Gerima ( Morgentau , 2008) as one of the favorites for the main prize of the festival, but fell behind the American Darren Aronofsky ( The Wrestler ). After tekoha , his contribution to the omnibus film Mundo Invisível (2011), followed by Il sorriso del capo (2011), a documentary about the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini .

Bechis also worked for Italian television in the past. In 1987 he realized a twenty-minute daytime program on the subject of environmental problems for Rai together with Enrico Deraglio , Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Adriano Sofri .

Filmography (selection)

  • 1982: Mi sembra d'averlo gia 'visto
  • 1984: Absent (short film)
  • 1987: Esterno tango
  • 1988: Storie metropolitane
  • 1991: Alambrado
  • 1997: Luca's Film (documentary)
  • 1999: Junta (Garage Olimpo)
  • 2001: Figli / Hijos
  • 2008: Birdwatchers - The Land of the Red People (BirdWatchers - La terra degli uomini rossi)
  • 2011: Mundo Invisível (Episode: Tekoha )
  • 2011: Il sorriso del capo (documentary)

Awards

Cóndor de Plata of the Asociación de Críticos Cinematográficos de Argentina

  • 2000: Best Director and nominated in the category Best Original Screenplay for Junta

David di Donatello

  • 1997: Nominated in the Best Screenplay category for Il Carniere
  • 2000: nominated in the categories Best Director and Best Screenplay for Junta

Sindacato Nazionale Giornalisti Cinematografici Italiani

  • 2000: Nominated in the categories Best Director and Best Original Story for Junta
  • 2002: Nominated in the category Best Original Story for Figli / Hijos

Premio Ariel

  • 2001: nominated in the category of Best Latin American Film for Junta

Cartagena Film Festival

  • 2000: Best Film for Junta

International Festival of New Latin American Films

  • 1993: Gran Coral - 3rd place for Alambrado
  • 1999: Gran Coral - Grand Prize Winner, Cuban Critics Award , Glauber Rocha Award , Martin Luther King Memorial Center Award, and OCIC Award for Junta

Festival de Cine Iberoamericano de Huelva

  • 1999: Best Film for Junta

Mostra de Cinema Llatinoamericà de Lleida

  • 2000: ICCI Screenplay Award for Junta

Locarno International Film Festival

Lucas - International Children's and Youth Film Festival

  • 2000: Lucas in the youth section and CIFEJ Award (Honorable Mention) for Junta

Paris Film Festival

  • 2002: Press Award for Figli / Hijos

Santa Barbara International Film Festival

  • 2000: Phoenix Prize for Junta

Thessaloniki Film Festival

  • 1999: Silver Alexander and FIPRESCI Prize and nominated for the Golden Alexander for Junta

Venice International Film Festival

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d cf. Biography and interview ( memento of the original from June 27, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the official German website of Junta (accessed September 6, 2008) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.flaxfilm.de
  2. ↑ a b c cf. Royer, Philippe: Retour sur la dictature argentine . In: La Croix, March 22, 2000, p. 21
  3. ↑ a b Cf. Hermanski, Susanne : Life in the workshop of death . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, December 4, 2003, No. 279, p. 8.
  4. ↑ See Bühler, Philipp: The torturers use a time clock . In: the daily newspaper, July 3, 2003, p. 16.
  5. ↑ Cf. Dilger, Gerhard: Der lichte Wald: Reserve today, showbiz tomorrow . In: the daily newspaper, November 19, 2008, p. 15.
  6. ↑ cf. Althen, Michael: The longing dies last at faz.net, September 3, 2008 (accessed on September 6, 2008)
  7. ^ Cf. Nord, Cristina: The forest and the field . In: the daily newspaper, September 3, 2008, p. 16.
  8. ↑ See Wolfgang Höbel : Champagne at last! at spiegel.de, September 3, 2008 (accessed on September 6, 2008)
  9. ↑ cf. Nicodemus, Katja: In the here and now . In: Die Zeit , September 4, 2008, No. 37, p. 50
  10. ↑ cf. I fatti del giorno ore 5:30 . ANSA , September 6th, 5:32 AM CET
  11. ↑ cf. Venezia 65: Leone d'oro a 'The Wrestler' on lastampa.it, September 6, 2008
  12. ↑ cf. Biography on the official Italian website of Junta (Italian, accessed September 6, 2008)
personal data
SURNAME Bechis, Marco
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian-Chilean film director and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH October 24, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Santiago de Chile , Chile