In Remembrance: Gerardo Vallejo

     Gerardo Vallejo, the Argentinean writer/director of Martin Fierro, Ave Solitaria, has passed away on February 6, 2007 in Buenos Aires. He was 65.

     Born January 4, 1942, Vallejo began his career with the 1971 documentary El Camino Hacia La Muerte Del Viejo Reales, a look at the hardships suffered by the sugarcane laborers in his native Tucuman, Argentina. Soon after, he help to form the Liberation Cinema Group with directors Fernando “Pino” Solanas and Octavio Getino. The group would revolutionize Argentine filmmaking through the 1970s by introducing political and socialy relevant thems to films.

     In 1975, Vallejo fell afoul of the far-right death squad the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, who planted a bomb and exploded his parents’ home. Vallejo fled to Panama and then Spain only to return home after the fall of Argentina’s military dictatorship in 1982.

     Vallejo expanded beyond documentaries by writing and directing such films as El Rigor Del Destino (The Sternness Of Fate, 1985), Con El Alma (1995) and El Inocente (2000).

     Vallejo’s final film was 2006’s Martin Fierro, a project based on Jose Hernandez’s epic poem of a guacho who is drafted to fight in Argentina’s 1850s conquest of native Indians.