File:1965 Favio (film).jpg

{es} Crónica de un niño solo / {en} Chronicle of a Boy Alone (Argentina, 1965), directed by Leonardo Favio, starring Diego Puente.

• Category:1965, Top Films

Polin is an eleven-year-old troublemaker in reform school for unknown reasons. After suffering from harsh treatment at the hands of the staff there, Polin finally reaches a breaking point and snaps, punching one of the supervisors in the face. He is then sent to the police station where he is locked up in a cell and left alone. Polin soon breaks out and travels back to his hometown, a rural fishing village, where he meets up with his best friend and falls back into his old routine—smoking, pickpocketing, shoplifting, skinny dipping with his friends and picking fights with the neighborhood bullies—all the while trying to avoid a run-in with the law, which he knows is inevitable.

The film is an indictment of a fascist regime running roughshod over its most vulnerable citizens, its children. Focusing on the bleak life of eleven-year-old bad boy Polin, who's been abandoned by his family and sent to live in a state-run orphanage, it's also a moving portrait of the human spirit imprisoned by the chains of well-intentioned fools. Inside the harsh confines of the supposedly beneficial institution, Polin and his fellow inmates must deal with constant physical and psychological abuse by the staff, as well as the natural emotional tensions brought on by their own burgeoning adolescence. But through it all, they manage to keep their hopes alive with optimistic talk of freedom and bold plans of escape. One day, when the opportunity finally arises, and Polin learns that freedom, too, has its price.

A slow moving but beautiful look at Polin, a boy of about ten living in a state institution and on the streets of Argentina. At the reformatory, he is misunderstood, abused, has some trouble with his peers, but once the lad breaks free, he manages to find some joy in life, despite the harsh surrounding environment. Suppressed by the Argentinean government for years. <BoyActors>

Regarded as one of the greatest Argentine films of all time.