Fito Páez

In November 2001, Fito Páez wrote personal checks to pay off the debts of a shoot that threatened to ruin him. The composer, born in Rosario in 1963, had healthy bank accounts thanks to the publishing rights to his songs. But he wanted to be a film director at any cost.

Before stepping onto a film set, he devoured movies in late-night double features while writing albums that worked like sound-based screenplays. In 1987, the murder of his grandmothers in Rosario led him to record Ciudad de pobres corazones, a raw work that filmmaker Fernando Pino Solanas heard before commissioning him to score Sur in 1988. That collaboration in Paris opened the doors of European film festivals to him.

And he quickly understood that film scoring demanded a technical rigor that rock rarely tolerates.

The learning curve was brutal.

A Million and a Half Dollars Down the Drain

In 1994 he shot the medium-length film La balada de Donna Helena on a mixed budget, combining his own savings with funding from a multinational record label. Seven years later he made the leap to feature films with Vidas privadas, a fiction about kidnappings during the dictatorship, sexual trauma and bedroom secrets, which he wrote together with novelist Alan Pauls. The cast brought together Cecilia Roth, Héctor Alterio and a Gael García Bernal on the rise after breaking out in Mexico.

Páez took on the executive producer role and spent a million and a half dollars of his own fortune on a shoot filled with tension between crew and actors. The film hit Argentine theaters in the middle of the economic crisis of 2001, and Buenos Aires critics gave it a harsh reception.

Nobody went to see it.

Commercial cinemas pulled the prints within a few weeks. The audience rejected a suffocating plot that mixed political wounds with family tragedy without offering any narrative relief. So he had to take on marathon concert tours across Latin America to plug the financial hole his first film left behind.

Settling Scores with the Screen

In 2007 he doubled down on directing with ¿De quién es el portaligas?, a farcical comedy starring Romina Ricci and Leonora Balcarce, with chases inspired by 1970s Italian cinema. Box office disappointed again, and distribution failed to make it past local borders.

The breakthrough came through his own life story. In 2021 he sold the rights to his memoirs to a production company, and in 2023 Netflix premiered the drama series El amor después del amor. Over eight episodes, two actors, Gaspar Offenhenden and Iván Hochman, played his youth up to his triumphant concerts at Vélez stadium.

And the story worked.

Páez supervised the sound masters and approved the musical sequences recreated in Buenos Aires. Alongside that audience success, in 2023 he also completed the scripts for two new film projects titled La pasión según las mujeres and Novela.

According to the official figures from Argentina's National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts, his first feature film's run ended with a total of 26,830 theater admissions and a final box office that never covered the cost of the negative.