Bortnik, Aida

(1938– )

    Argentine playwright, screenwriter, and journalist. Born in Buenos Aires, Bortnik was a founding member of Teatro Abierto Argentino (Open Theater of Argentina). Her play Papá querido (Dear Dad) was one of the works that inaugurated the first cycle of Teatro Abierto Argentino in 1981. Internationally, Bortnik is best known for her screenplay, in collaboration with director Luis Puenzo, for the 1985 movie The Official Story, the first Argentine movie to discuss openly the topic of the desaparecidos (missing). The Official Story was awarded an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and both Puenzo and Bortnik were also nominated for a “Best Screenplay, Written Directly for the Screen” award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that year.

   Bortnik began her career as a playwright and actress. During the early 1970s, the tumultuous years of General Alejandro Lanusse’s dictablanda (soft dictatorship—a play on words on the Spanish word for dictatorship, dictadura), Bortnik’s experiences were typical of the intimidation tactics that would soon be employed by the military junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla against the Argentine citizenry. Scholar Jean Graham-Jones quotes Bortnik as remembering a 1972 staging of her play Soldados y soldaditos (Soldiers and Tin Soldiers) in the city of Rosario, Argentina. Audience members had to show identification to enter the theater, and a row of soldiers, weapons at the ready, was stationed behind the last row of spectators. In 1974 Bortnik adapted Mario Benedetti’s novel La tregua (The Truce) for the screen. The film, directed by Sergio Renán, was the first Latin American film nominated for an Oscar. Later, she would begin her collaboration as short-story writer with the magazine Humor, work that would be translated and anthologized in journals and academic publications in Europe and the United States. In the 1970s, she also worked as a journalist and critic for several publications in Buenos Aires, such as the weeklies Primera Plana, Panorama, Siete Días, and the daily La Opinión, as well as radio and television outlets. Since 1979, Bortnik has taught screenwriting in several academic institutions in Argentina, most notably the Universidad de Cine and the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She has also participated in screenwriting workshops for the Sundance Foundation in Utah, United States. In 1986 Bortnik was the first Latin American woman to become a permanent member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She is credited, alone or in collaboration, for her work as a screenwriter for noted movies such as Pobre mariposa (Poor Butterfly, 1986), Tango feroz: la leyenda de Tanguito (Fierce Tango: The Legend of Tanguito, 1993), Caballos salvajes (Wild Horses, 1995), Cenizas del paraíso (Ashes from Paradise, 1997), and La soledad era esto (This Was Solitude, 2002), as well as for the 1989 adaptation, co-written and directed by Puenzo, of the novel Gringo viejo, by Mexican author Carlos Fuentes, released internationally as Old Gringo, which remains her sole Hollywood incursion to date. Her work has been recognized throughout the United States and Latin America as well as in her native Argentina, where she has been honored by ARGENTORES (Sociedad General de Autores de Argentina/General Association of Argentine Authors). In addition to an Oscar nomination, Aida Bortnik has been the recipient of several awards in major international film competitions in San Sebastián, Berlin, Cannes, Montreal, Toronto, and Havana. Reportedly, her latest project involves a screenplay for a movie titled Azucena 375 días, still in production, based on the life of the Argentine activist Azucena de Vicenti, the founder of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, who was kidnapped in 1977 along with several other members of the group by a death squad under the leadership of Alfredo Astiz.