Lita Stantic directed only one film but managed to change Argentine cinema forever.
The 85-year-old producer, whose decades-long work is the object of a month-long special program at the Buenos Aires Latin American Art Museum (MALBA) in July, fostered some of Argentina’s most daring directors, like feminist maverick María Luisa Bemberg in the 1980s. Years later, in the early 2000s, she supported and forwarded the new generation of filmmakers that drove New Argentine Cinema, including Lucrecia Martel and Pablo Trapero.
Born in 1941 in Buenos Aires City, Stantic started in the filmmaking world in the 1960s, co-directing short films with her partner Pablo Szir, father of her only daughter Alejandra, as well as filming in the advertising industry.
Szir, who was also a Montoneros guerrilla officer during the military dictatorship that took over the country in 1976, was kidnapped by military forces in October of that year, and is disappeared since then. Although they had separated in 1973, Szir still managed to communicate with Stantic while captive, and was last seen in the clandestine detention center known as Sheraton in the Buenos Aires province.
In the 1970s male-dominated film industry, Stantic managed to climb up the ladder and worked as a chief of production for ten years. She was involved in landmark Argentine films like Lautaro Murúa’s La Raulito, Adolfo Aristarain’s La parte del león and the early films of pioneering feminist director María Luisa Bemberg, with whom she founded a production company in 1978, a rarity for two women at the time.
Stantic produced five of María Luisa Bemberg’s feature-length films, including divorce drama Señora de nadie (1982) and period love story Camila (1984), which earned an Oscar nomination in the best film in a foreign language category.
The film, about the real-life forbidden romance of young aristocrat Camila O’Gorman and priest Ladislao Gutiérrez in 1847, was also one of the most popular films in Argentine history, with over 2 million tickets sold.
“Everybody knew”
In 1993, Stantic directed Un muro de silencio (A Wall of Silence), her only film to date, based on her personal ordeal with the kidnapping and disappearance of her daughter’s father. The film, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Lautaro Murúa, is the story of a British filmmaker who travels to Argentina to shoot the story of a woman whose husband was disappeared by the dictatorship.
Influenced by the grim visual style of 1960s Polish cinema and released while impunity laws protecting the military from prosecution were still in force, A Wall of Silence dived into the psychological trauma of coping with the disappearance of a loved one while raising a child.
The film was also among the very first Argentine productions to openly challenge the then-common notion that society had been mostly unaware of the clandestine and systematic genocide the dictatorship was carrying out.
By the late 1990s and already a renowned industry member who chaired Argentina’s Film Industry Chamber, Stantic began fostering the careers of emerging independent filmmakers who were trying to make their first feature-length films amid dire economic circumstances that preceded the country’s 2001 financial meltdown.
Stantic produced two of the first three films by renowned Salta-born filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, including The Swamp (2001) and The Holy Girl (2004), as well as Pablo Trapero’s Crane World (1999), a spearhead of what was later known as New Argentine Cinema, Diego Lerman’s So Suddenly (2002), and Israel Adrián Caetano’s Bolivia (2001) and Red Bear (2002), among many others that will be screened in the MALBA series Lita Stantic: there will be no one like her.
While today’s stalled Argentine film industry is going through a terminal crisis as a consequence of president Javier Milei’s austerity policies and “cultural war”, Stantic’s drive remains unfettered. She continues supporting independent, audacious films, like Adriana Lestido’s Errante or Virginia Croatto’s La guardería, about the Cuban day care center for children of Latin American guerrilla members in the 1970s.
MALBA’s program stressed Stantic’s “unique” career, while the museum’s film curator, historian Fernando Martín Peña — co-author of the book Lita Stantic: El cine es automóvil y poema (‘Lita Stantic: cinema as automobile and poem’) with Máximo Eseverri — described her as “nothing more and nothing less than Argentina’s most important film producer.”
