Fernando "Pino" Solanas is an Argentinian director, screenwriter, author, politician, and public intellectual. Alongside Octavio Getino, Solanas is a founder of the Third Cinema political film movement, which would serve to express the political challenges of Latin American cinema and contribute to transforming filmmaking practice. His most important film, La hora de los hornos [Hour of the Furnaces] (1968) is a forceful critique of Neocolonialism, violence, and underdevelopment. The film would yield the manifesto "Towards a Third Cinema" co-authored by Solanas and Getino in 1969. Third Cinema, for Solanas and Getino, is a radical film practice that opposes First Cinema (Hollywood cinema) and rejects Second Cinema (auteur, European art cinema) in favor of articulating a political cinema attendant to the problems of the world’s underclasses, and committed to the decolonization of the developing world. A dedicated activist and political persona, Solanas continues to make films and inroads in to Argentine politics. Other notable works include Memorias del saqueo [Social Genocide] (2004), a documentary about political corruption, economic privatization, and widespread hunger in Argentina, as well as Dignidad de los nadies [Dignity of the Nobodies] (2005), a film about the existential challenges facing Argentine people following the economic crisis of 2001. Solanas was elected to the Argentine Senate as a representative of the progressive party Proyecto Sur. Actively writing, producing, and directing films in search of the film-essay form, Solanas’ most recent feature documentary is titled La guerra del fracking (2013), a film about the environmental costs, health risks, and economic unsustainability of hydraulic fracking in contemporary Argentina.
