CHRONICLE OF A BOY ALONE

Leonardo Favio (1938–2012) was a film director, actor and singer, and one of Argentina’s most enduring cultural figures. He began acting in movies in the 1950s and he soon became “the Argentine James Dean.” In 1965 he directed his first feature-length movie, the semi-autobiographical Chronicle of a Boy Alone. That film and some of his other early works explored the difficulties of life at the margins of society. While many of them were well received by critics, he did not have consistent commercial success until the mid- 1970s. Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf, his take on the werewolf myth, became one of the top-grossing films in Argentina. In the 1960s he began a singing career that produced a string of hit ballads. He became politically active as his popularity increased. His support for the former president Juan Domingo Peron prompted him to flee Argentina in the late 1970s after the country’s military took control of its government. He returned more than a decade later, after the military surrendered power. In the late 1990s he made Peron, a Symphony of Feeling, a nearly six-hour documentary about the former leader. In 2001, the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York held a major retrospective of his work.