ArgentinaObituary

Fabián Bielinsky

Fresh new spirit of mainstream cinema in Argentina

The sudden death of Fabián Bielinsky, aged 47, apparently of a heart attack, has robbed Argentinian cinema of one of its newest talents only days after his second feature film, El Aura (2005), won a series of national cinema awards, including those for best director and best film. It followed his hugely capable and entertaining debut movie of 2000, Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens).

Nine Queens, about a scam involving a sheet of rare stamps from the Weimar republic, was one of the last films to be completed in Argentina before the country's political and economic collapse at the end of 2001. It presents the picture of a corrupt society, where everyone is conning everyone else, a metaphor for a dangerous political situation on the verge of coming to a head, with a closing scene - as a bank puts up its shutters and depositors clamour for their money - that is nothing short of prophetic.

The film was an old-fashioned thriller, which accomplished its task with intelligence and humour, and without dwelling on the inevitable blood and violence - the kind of film Hollywood is incapable of making any more, but yearns for none the less. Bielinsky was predictably courted by more than one Hollywood major studio but declined their offers, and in the end Gregory Jacobs's remake, Criminal (2004), was produced by Steven Soderbergh, with results far inferior to the original.

The Aura (yet to be seen in Britain) is the story of a shy taxidermist who secretly dreams of accomplishing the perfect robbery. On a hunting trip, his dreams become reality when he accidentally kills a man who turns out to be a real criminal, and inherits his scheme to rob an armoured van carrying casino profits. Bielinsky called it a psychological thriller, much darker and lacking the humour of Nine Queens.

Bielinsky's cinema was rooted in the genres of the mainstream rather than the personal, questing and sometimes neo-neorealist films by directors like Lucrecia Martel, Adrián Caetano and Pablo Trapero, which have made recent Argentinian cinema the most interesting in Latin America.

Born in Buenos Aires, Bielinsky made his first short on super-8 as a 13-year-old schoolboy, choosing to adapt an unsettling story by Julio Cortázar. He grew up under the military dictatorship which took power in 1976 - an inauspicious time for Argentinian cinema - but was never in any doubt about his purpose in life. He went straight from school to study film-making at the national film institute, the Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales, where he later taught directing. His graduation film was another adaptation, this time of a story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, which not only earned him his first international prize, at the Huesca film festival in Spain, but also displayed his predilection for a classical style of narrative construction.

Entering the film industry at the same time as the fall of the military dictatorship and the lifting of censorship in 1983, Bielinsky found work as an assistant director for several of the leading names in Argentinian cinema, including Miguel Pérez, Carlos Soria and Eliseo Subiela. He would later observe that his time as an assistant director - often working with first-time directors - stood him in good stead, since when he came to make his own films he already felt at home on the set. He also worked in commercials - he was Wim Wenders' righthand man on the filming of a Mégane commercial in Argentina - and wrote the script for a futuristic allegory, La sonámbula, which was directed by Fernando Spiner in 1998.

Bielinsky was on a trip to Sao Paulo to cast a commercial when he died in his hotel room. He leaves a wife and a son.

· Fabián Bielinsky, film director, born February 3 1959; died June 28 2006.

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