the best movies of the actor

The rebellious Patagonia (1974)

Alterio began his career at the end of the first wave of new Argentine cinema of the 60s (he played Simón Bolivar in The Sword Saintby Leopoldo Torre Nilson) and linked to the second, of which he was the absolute protagonist.

None were as politically important as The rebellious Patagonia, of Hector Oliverawhere the repression of labor movements in the 1920s in the southern region of Argentina was recreated. Alterio plays the soldier in charge of evaluating the situation of the workers, with whom he empathizes, but who ends up being commissioned to carry out a massacre. In the emotional final scene, Alterio receives honors while experiencing guilt.

The film was approved by Juan Domingo Perón and later banned by Isabelita Perón. It triumphed at the Berlin festival, winning the Golden Bear, but it could not be screened again in Argentina until 1984 and its creators, and most of its cast, ended up exiled.

The truce (1974)

His last film from his first Argentine period is one of the great successes in the history of Argentine cinema. Directed by Sergio Renan and adaptation of the novel by Mario Benedetti, Alterio plays a worn-out office worker, a widower with three children, who regains his passion for life when he meets a younger woman. “His most heartfelt performance,” for the president of the Film Academy, Fernando Méndez Leite, was the definitive letter of introduction for Alterio in the world after the film’s nomination for an Oscar in non-English language.

To an unknown god (1977)

Elías Querejeta, one of the people that Alterio has always indicated as one of his main benefactors of his first exile (along with Núria Espert y Juan Diego), hired him for Jaime Chávarri’s film about a homosexual man who returns to his native Granada, where he attended Franco’s repression in the Civil War as a child.

Alterio quickly learned to adapt his Buenos Aires accent to the new Spanish cinema and was awarded the Silver Shell for best actor at the 1977 San Sebastián Festival.

Pending subject (1977)

Jose Luis Garci was the filmmaker who best portrayed the first adult generation of democracy and Apending signature the key to the cinema of the Transition. After the story of the reunion of a youthful love between José Sacristán and Fiorella Faltoyano, the political climate at the end of the Franco regime palpitated: Alterio played a copy of Marcelino Camacho, imprisoned, who was visited by his lawyer played by Sacristán. In Argentina, immersed in the military dictatorship, the film was released mutilated, without Alterio’s scenes.

The nest (1980)

The movie of Jaime de Armiñán, also nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film, it was uncomfortable then and it is even more so now. Alterio played an orchestra director who fell in love, platonically, with a 13-year-old girl played by Ana Torrent (who just four years before played Alterio’s daughter in Cría Cuervos), although the background is much more subtle than its disturbing starting point. The nest may be the best film of its director, who would once again have Alterio for My generationl, in 1987.

The Cuenca crime (1979)

In a rhyme with The rebellious PatagoniaPilar Miró’s film about a case of gruesome torture and murder by the Civil Guard at the beginning of the 20th century was censored by the UCD Minister of Culture, Ricardo de la Cierva, and could not be released until two years later, when it was authorized by the Supreme Court.

Alterio played Judge Emilio Isasa, responsible for reopening the summary that would lead to the arrest and conviction, after horrendous torture, of two men for the murder of a man who had not even died.

The official story (1985)

Or the Argentine tragedy condensed into a drama about a woman (Norma Aleandro) who begins to suspect that her adopted daughter has been stolen by her military husband (Héctor Alterio).

The first Argentine film to win the Oscar, directed by Luis Puenzo, is a film with a script and actors, where the pressure cooker explodes in the final scene, one of the most shocking in Spanish-language cinema, in which Alterio, until then an attentive father and husband, explodes violently hitting his wife when he is confronted about the origin of his daughter.

The bride’s son (2001)

Another key title in Argentine cinema (with a new Oscar nomination included), which marked the reunion of Alterio with Norma Aleandro, and a triumph for its director and screenwriter Juan José Campanella. The protagonist, Ricardo Darín, is a man stressed by his obligations who finds calm by organizing the wedding of his mother, who is sick with Alzheimer’s, with his father, played by Alterio.