Tire dié

Considered as the first survey documentary, "Tire dié" was originally a photographic essay, proposed by Neo-realist filmmaker Fernando Birri to his students, when he founded the first documentary school in Latin America. The students researched the living conditions in the province of Santa Fe (Argentina), and finally chose one subject for the documentary: the children of the Tire Dié neighborhood, who risked their lives every day, waiting for the passing of a train, to run and beg by the rails, yelling to the passengers "Tire die(z centavos", or "Toss me a dime".) Given the low budget of the production, the filmmakers worked with limited conditions and were forced to re-release the film with added narration to supply the deficiency of the direct sound. Yet it is a moving documentary, and it became one of the founding stones of the "New Latin American cinema" movement in the late 1950s and the Sixties.