“By the Light of Forgetfulness”

Based on examples from his own work, the filmmaker explores different uses of materials labelled as “found”: anonymous photographs, old newsreels, recycled television shows, and found footage. The “found” materials, almost by definition, previosuly had to be lost or somehow forgotten. They are now seen in a new way by the light of this forgetting. In the discarded, the abandoned, there is an insubordinate energy, an unexpected illumination that cannot be found in that which is deliberate, in what was searched for and found.

Andrés Di Tella has directed eleven feature-length films: Montoneros, una historia, Macedonio Fernández, Prohibido, La televisión y yo, Fotografías, El país del Diablo, Hachazos, ¡Volveremos a las montañas!, Máquina de sueños, El ojo en el cielo and 327 cuadernos. His work spans video art, installations and performance pieces, as well as TV documentaries. He has written a non-fiction book, Hachazos (Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2011) and many essays and book chapters.

Retrospectives of his work have been held at the Centro Cultural Rojas of the University of Buenos Aires (2007); Filmoteca de Catalunya of Barcelona (2008); Filmoteca Española of Madrid (2009); Festival de Lima (2009); Cines del Sur, Granada (2011); Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo (2011); E Tudo Verdade at Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia (2012); Festival dei Popoli, Florence (2012), Universidad Católica, Santiago de Chile (2013), Tabakalera Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, San Sebastián (2015), Filmoteca de Galicia, A Coruña (2015), Casa de América, Madrid (2016).

He was the founder in 1999 of the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI), considered by many the principal film event in Latin America. From 2002 to 2011, he was the Artistic Director of the Princeton Documentary Festival, at Princeton University, where he has also been a visiting professor. He currently teaches film at the art department of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella.