Toss Me a Dime

While the media tend to concentrate on the bustling modern city life in 1950s Santa Fe, Argentina, there’s very little prosperity to be seen in the district known as Tire Dié. All we see is poverty, hunger and unemployment. Between 1956 and 1958, filmmaker Fernando Birri and a group of students captured this neighborhood on film. Toss Me a Dime opens with aerial shots of the big city and a voice-over providing general information. But then the camera zooms in on daily life in underprivileged areas, filming at eye level the many children who wait for the train every afternoon to beg passengers for a little money. Birri is known as the founder of New Latin American Cinema, a movement that emerged in the late 1950s and was influenced by Neorealism in Italy (where Birri studied film) and as a counterbalance to Hollywood. Due to lack of money and resources for film production, filmmakers were looking for new forms of cinema, including documentary. They chose a critical approach that reflected the complex social and political reality in which poverty, hunger and suppression were part of the daily lives of the common people.