Luis Puenzo

Luis Adalberto Puenzo was an Argentine film director, screenwriter and producer whose 1985 drama La historia oficial (The Official Story) gave Argentina its first Academy Award and became the first Latin American film to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. He died in Buenos Aires on 21 April 2026, at the age of 80.

Puenzo was born on 19 February 1946 in Buenos Aires, in the Floresta neighbourhood. He was a member of the twelfth graduating class of the Liceo Naval Militar Almirante Brown, whose classmates published a farewell notice when he died. He has said he learned cinema from old films watched as a teenager at the Lorraine, a Buenos Aires repertory cinema.

His career began in advertising. From 1965 he produced television commercials in Argentina, and with the film editor and trombonist Sergio Tamburri he founded the production company Luis Puenzo Cine, renamed Cinemanía S.A. in 1974. He made his feature debut as director and writer in 1973 with Luces de mis zapatos, a children's comedy starring Norman Briski, and in 1975 directed the segment Cinco años de vida in the collective film Las sorpresas. During the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983, when many filmmakers were persecuted, exiled or disappeared, he concentrated on advertising work.

Puenzo began writing La historia oficial before the regime collapsed after the 1982 Falklands War. Co-written with Aída Bortnik, the film follows Alicia, a history teacher played by Norma Aleandro, who begins to suspect that her adopted daughter is the child of people disappeared by the dictatorship, while her husband, played by Héctor Alterio, embodies civilian complicity with the regime. Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo leaders Estela de Carlotto and Rosa Roisinblit met Puenzo and Bortnik while they wrote the script and gave them real photographs of missing grandchildren to appear on screen. Puenzo later recalled that the mother of the child actress Analía Castro received death threats during the shoot, and that the crew staged a fake wrap party and press conference and then kept filming in secret.

The film won the Oscar on 24 March 1986, the tenth anniversary of the 1976 coup, a coincidence Puenzo noted from the stage. It also won the Golden Globe for best foreign language film, the Silver Condor awards for best film, director and original screenplay, the People's Choice Award at Toronto and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes, where Aleandro shared the best actress prize. Puenzo and Bortnik were also nominated for the Oscar for best original screenplay.

International work followed. Puenzo directed Old Gringo (1989), an adaptation of Carlos Fuentes's novel set during the Mexican Revolution, starring Jane Fonda, Gregory Peck and Jimmy Smits, and La peste (The Plague, 1992), based on Albert Camus's novel, with William Hurt, Robert Duvall, Raúl Juliá and Sandrine Bonnaire. He directed a segment of Broken Silence (2002), a documentary series on Holocaust survivors, and in 2004 released La puta y la ballena, shot in Argentina and Spain with Leonardo Sbaraglia and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón. As a producer he backed later work including Infancia clandestina (2012).

Puenzo was also a shaper of Argentine film policy. In 1994 he took part in drafting the National Film Law, Law 24,377, which established the financial autonomy and funding structure of the Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA). In 2004 he was a founding member of the Academia de las Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas de la Argentina, serving on its first board. Under President Alberto Fernández he was president of INCAA from late 2019 until April 2022.

He was married to the producer Nora Rousseaux, his creative partner on several projects. Their four children, Lucía, Nicolás, Esteban and Sebastián, all work in film and audiovisual production; Lucía Puenzo is the acclaimed director of XXY, El niño pez and Wakolda. "We are four siblings and all four of us make films," Lucía once said, describing growing up on his sets.

In his final years Puenzo was treated for cancer, with several hospital stays and relapses. In 2025 he was honoured for his career at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival and received an award from Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo marking the 40th anniversary of La historia oficial, telling an interviewer he was still writing and hoped to die "with my boots on". He died in Buenos Aires on the morning of 21 April 2026; his daughter Lucía confirmed the cause was cancer. He was mourned by Argentores, INCAA, the Argentine Actors Association, the national Culture Secretariat and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, who called him "a friend". After a wake in the Núñez neighbourhood, his funeral cortege left on Thursday 23 April for the Jardín de Paz cemetery in Pilar.