Marco Bechis

The son of a Chilean woman of Swiss-French origins and an Italian father, he grew up in Sao Paolo and Buenos Aires. At the age of twenty he was expelled from Argentina for political reasons: he landed in Milan and there he lived throughout the 1980s, while also spending lots of time in New York, Los Angeles and Paris. He has been a school teacher in Buenos Aires, a Polaroid photographer and a video-artist in New York. He got to directing after going to the Albedo film school in Milano in 1981. His first movie, Barbed Wire (1991), was screened in festivals in Locarno, Madrid and Brussels. Bechis went on to direct Garage Olimpo (1999), a film that has been screened in a wide range of international festivals including Cannes.