\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\t Lita Stantic directed only one film but managed to change Argentine cinema forever.<\/p>\n
The 85-year-old producer, whose decades-long work is the object of a month-long special program at the Buenos Aires Latin American Art Museum (MALBA) in July, fostered some of Argentina\u2019s most daring directors, like feminist maverick Mar\u00eda Luisa Bemberg in the 1980s. Years later, in the early 2000s, she supported and forwarded the new generation of filmmakers that drove New Argentine Cinema, including Lucrecia Martel and Pablo Trapero.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Born in 1941 in Buenos Aires City, Stantic started in the filmmaking world in the 1960s, co-directing short films with her partner Pablo Szir, father of her only daughter Alejandra, as well as filming in the advertising industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Szir, who was also a Montoneros guerrilla officer during the military dictatorship that took over the country in 1976, was kidnapped by military forces in October of that year, and is disappeared since then. Although they had separated in 1973, Szir still managed to communicate with Stantic while captive, and was last seen in the clandestine detention center known as Sheraton in the Buenos Aires province.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the 1970s male-dominated film industry, Stantic managed to climb up the ladder and worked as a chief of production for ten years. She was involved in landmark Argentine films like Lautaro Mur\u00faa\u2019s La Raulito, Adolfo Aristarain\u2019s La parte del le\u00f3n and the early films of pioneering feminist director Mar\u00eda Luisa Bemberg, with whom she founded a production company in 1978, a rarity for two women at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Camila Stantic produced five of Mar\u00eda Luisa Bemberg\u2019s feature-length films, including divorce drama Se\u00f1ora de nadie (1982) and period love story Camila (1984), which earned an Oscar nomination in the best film in a foreign language category.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The film, about the real-life forbidden romance of young aristocrat Camila O\u2019Gorman and priest Ladislao Guti\u00e9rrez in 1847, was also one of the most popular films in Argentine history, with over 2 million tickets sold.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody knew\u201d In 1993, Stantic directed Un muro de silencio (A Wall of Silence), her only film to date, based on her personal ordeal with the kidnapping and disappearance of her daughter\u2019s father. The film, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Lautaro Mur\u00faa, is the story of a British filmmaker who travels to Argentina to shoot the story of a woman whose husband was disappeared by the dictatorship.<\/p>\n
Influenced by the grim visual style of 1960s Polish cinema and released while impunity laws protecting the military from prosecution were still in force, A Wall of Silence dived into the psychological trauma of coping with the disappearance of a loved one while raising a child.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The film was also among the very first Argentine productions to openly challenge the then-common notion that society had been mostly unaware of the clandestine and systematic genocide the dictatorship was carrying out.<\/p>\n
By the late 1990s and already a renowned industry member who chaired Argentina\u2019s Film Industry Chamber, Stantic began fostering the careers of emerging independent filmmakers who were trying to make their first feature-length films amid dire economic circumstances that preceded the country\u2019s 2001 financial meltdown.<\/p>\n
Stantic produced two of the first three films by renowned Salta-born filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, including The Swamp (2001) and The Holy Girl (2004), as well as Pablo Trapero\u2019s Crane World (1999), a spearhead of what was later known as New Argentine Cinema, Diego Lerman\u2019s So Suddenly (2002), and Israel Adri\u00e1n Caetano\u2019s Bolivia (2001) and Red Bear (2002), among many others that will be screened in the MALBA series Lita Stantic: there will be no one like her.<\/p>\n
The Swamp Red Bear So Suddenly While today\u2019s stalled Argentine film industry is going through a terminal crisis as a consequence of president Javier Milei\u2019s austerity policies and \u201ccultural war\u201d, Stantic\u2019s drive remains unfettered. She continues supporting independent, audacious films, like Adriana Lestido\u2019s Errante or Virginia Croatto\u2019s La guarder\u00eda, about the Cuban day care center for children of Latin American guerrilla members in the 1970s.<\/p>\n
MALBA\u2019s program stressed Stantic\u2019s \u201cunique\u201d career, while the museum\u2019s film curator, historian Fernando Mart\u00edn Pe\u00f1a \u2014 co-author of the book Lita Stantic: El cine es autom\u00f3vil y poema (\u2018Lita Stantic: cinema as automobile and poem\u2019) with M\u00e1ximo Eseverri \u2014 described her as \u201cnothing more and nothing less than Argentina\u2019s most important film producer.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lita Stantic directed only one film but managed to change Argentine cinema forever. The 85-year-old producer, whose decades-long work is the object of a month-long special program at the Buenos Aires Latin American Art Museum (MALBA) in July, fostered some of Argentina\u2019s most daring directors, like feminist maverick Mar\u00eda Luisa Bemberg in the 1980s. Years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":87596,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[149,316,1366,21972,7469,4726,38],"tags":[133,4897,1364,21968,7464,4723,136],"class_list":["post-87595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-culture-ideas","category-film","category-film-series","category-lita-stantic","category-lucrecia-martel","category-malba","category-what-to-do-in-buenos-aires","tag-culture-ideas","tag-film","tag-film-series","tag-lita-stantic","tag-lucrecia-martel","tag-malba","tag-what-to-do-in-buenos-aires"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/service.codeus.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}