Marcelo Piñeyro, the director who made Argentines line up for their own cinema

Marcelo Piñeyro

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	March 5, 1953 Buenos Aires, Argentina
Occupation	Film director
Known for	The Method, Burnt Money, Kamchatka
Awards	2 Goya · Goya (shared)

The moment most Argentines remember from Marcelo Piñeyro’s cinema is a shout. Héctor Alterio, as an old man on the run across Patagonia with a young clerk from the finance company that swallowed his savings, yells at dusk, expletive first, that being alive is worth it. The line was never in the script. Piñeyro had asked Alterio to call out anything at all to close a rehearsal, with no plan to keep it, and later chose it as the last words of Caballos salvajes. Trusting the accident and the audience over the plan made him the director who got a generation of Argentines to line up for their own films. It also leaves an odd gap in the record: the filmmaker whose name once meant a full house has not released a feature written for the screen in more than a decade.

He reached directing late, and through the production office. He studied film at the fine arts school of the National University of La Plata until the military dictatorship shut it down, and the short films he made there disappeared with it. With Luis Puenzo he then founded the production company Cinemanía, and his name first travelled as a producer, on La historia oficial, Puenzo’s drama about a history teacher who begins to suspect that her adopted daughter was taken from a prisoner of the regime.

Piñeyro, born in Buenos Aires on 5 March 1953, has recalled that the shoot began in late February 1984, weeks into the return of democracy, and that the crew worked through threats because nobody believed the democratic window would stay open for long. La historia oficial, released in English as The Official Story, became the first Latin American film to win the Oscar for best foreign-language film.

His own first feature took years of false starts. Tango feroz: la leyenda de Tanguito, written with Aída Bortnik, turned the life of Tanguito, a songwriter from the first days of Argentine rock, into a doomed romance played by Fernán Mirás and Cecilia Dopazo. It opened in June 1993, a bad year for cinemas, and became one of the great box-office events of the decade, the first meeting with both national cinema and national rock for many of the country’s teenagers.

Piñeyro has called Caballos salvajes and Tango feroz “apocryphal autobiographies”: nothing in them happened to him, he told La Nación, but they carry the spirit of the boy he was at seventeen and twenty. The second of them, released in 1995, starts as a Buenos Aires crime story and turns into a western on the empty Patagonian roads. It received a special jury mention at Sundance. Cenizas del paraíso, his third script with Bortnik, followed in 1997, a judicial thriller built around a judge, his sons and the death of a young woman. It was the highest-grossing film in Argentina that year and won the Goya for best Spanish-language foreign film.

With the novelist Marcelo Figueras as co-writer, his films grew harder. Plata quemada, adapted from Ricardo Piglia’s novel about a real bank robbery of the 1960s, put Eduardo Noriega and Leonardo Sbaraglia in the roles of two gunmen who are also lovers, cornered in an apartment in Montevideo. It brought him a second Goya for best Spanish-language foreign film in 2001. Kamchatka, with Ricardo Darín and Cecilia Roth as parents forced into hiding under the dictatorship, is told from the height of their elder son. When its Argentine financing collapsed in the crisis of 2001, the European co-producers offered to shoot it in Europe; Piñeyro and his actors refused to make a film about resistance while on the run themselves. It was made in Argentina a year later and became the country’s Oscar submission.

Spain was the next stop. El método, from Jordi Galceran’s play El método Grönholm, locked seven candidates for one executive job inside a Madrid office tower while protesters filled the streets below. It won Piñeyro and his co-writer Mateo Gil the Goya for best adapted screenplay in 2006. Las viudas de los jueves, his 2009 adaptation of Claudia Piñeiro‘s novel about the husbands of a gated community outside Buenos Aires, brought him back home, and Ismael, with Mario Casas, Belén Rueda and Sergi López, returned him to Spain in 2013.

The legend he built has its dissenters, and the loudest ones knew the real man behind his first hit. When the documentary Leyenda feroz revisited Tango feroz for its thirtieth anniversary in 2024, Javier Martínez, Ricardo Soulé and Litto Nebbia, musicians who were around Tanguito, declined to take part because they do not recognise the true story in it. Piñeyro never secured the rights to Tanguito’s own songs, including “La balsa”, and filled the film with other classics of Argentine rock instead. The critic Diego Lerer noted that the documentary ends up honouring a legend that is no longer Tanguito’s but the film’s. That is the uncomfortable side of Piñeyro’s gift: the emotion lands first, and the history has to catch up.

His next large audience came from television. Netflix‘s El Reino, released in English as The Kingdom, was created and written with Claudia Piñeiro, no relation despite the surname. Diego Peretti plays an evangelical pastor who becomes a running mate in a presidential race, opposite Mercedes Morán, Chino Darín, Nancy Dupláa and Joaquín Furriel. Piñeyro directed five of the eight episodes of the first season, which premiered in August 2021; Miguel Cohan directed the rest. The Christian Alliance of Evangelical Churches of Argentina accused the creators of portraying believers as dangerous fanatics, and Piñeiro answered that the campaign against the show amounted to an attempt at censorship. A second and final season arrived in March 2023.

The recent work looks backwards and sideways. Tango feroz was remastered for its anniversary, in line with his habit of restoring his old films because, as he put it, he does not want them to die. In March 2026 he premiered La verdadera historia de Ricardo III at the Málaga Film Festival, a film version of Calixto Bieito’s staging of Shakespeare at the Teatro San Martín in Buenos Aires, shot with several cameras, with Furriel as Richard. Its first Argentine screenings came at BAFICI in April.

Two projects are now in development. Piñeyro is showrunner and writer of a new Netflix series that Cohan will direct, and he has written a feature called Mientras respiro with Figueras, which he said in March was set to shoot in Mexico. If it goes ahead, it will be his first film written for the cinema since Ismael, made far from the Buenos Aires streets where his audience first found him.

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Tags: Claudia Piñeiro, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Marcelo Piñeyro, Caballos salvajes, El Reino, Plata quemada

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