Marco Bechis

Directing

Marco Bechis

Born 1955-10-24 · Santiago del Cile, Cile

Marco Bechis (Santiago de Chile, Chile, October 24, 1955) is a Chilean-Italian screenwriter and film director. He is a survivor of the concentration camp “El Club Atlético”, where he was detained for 15 days in April 1977, during the Argentine military dictatorship. He was expelled to Italy, since he had a passport from that country. His film "Garage Olimpo", which talks about this dictatorship, was presented at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.

Acting credits

Behind the camera

Back To Buenos Aires poster
NR

It follows Mariano Guerra as he returns to Argentina to testify against soldiers who tortured him during the dictatorship, focusing not on revenge but on his inner struggle with guilt, trauma, and the lasting psychological impact of violence kept largely off-screen.

Back To Buenos Aires

2026

Back To Buenos Aires poster
NR

It follows Mariano Guerra as he returns to Argentina to testify against soldiers who tortured him during the dictatorship, focusing not on revenge but on his inner struggle with guilt, trauma, and the lasting psychological impact of violence kept largely off-screen.

Back To Buenos Aires

2026

Back To Buenos Aires poster
NR

It follows Mariano Guerra as he returns to Argentina to testify against soldiers who tortured him during the dictatorship, focusing not on revenge but on his inner struggle with guilt, trauma, and the lasting psychological impact of violence kept largely off-screen.

Back To Buenos Aires

2026

Back To Buenos Aires poster
NR

It follows Mariano Guerra as he returns to Argentina to testify against soldiers who tortured him during the dictatorship, focusing not on revenge but on his inner struggle with guilt, trauma, and the lasting psychological impact of violence kept largely off-screen.

Back To Buenos Aires

2026

Garage Olimpo poster
6.8

María is eighteen years old, she lives with her mother in an old house in Buenos Aires in 1978, subletting rooms and giving classes to poor illiterate adults. Suddenly she is abducted by a military squad and finds herself accused of subversion and submitted to torture in the hideous underground of the Garage Olimpo, while her mother desperately tries to find her.

Garage Olimpo

1999

Garage Olimpo poster
6.8

María is eighteen years old, she lives with her mother in an old house in Buenos Aires in 1978, subletting rooms and giving classes to poor illiterate adults. Suddenly she is abducted by a military squad and finds herself accused of subversion and submitted to torture in the hideous underground of the Garage Olimpo, while her mother desperately tries to find her.

Garage Olimpo

1999

Garage Olimpo poster
6.8

María is eighteen years old, she lives with her mother in an old house in Buenos Aires in 1978, subletting rooms and giving classes to poor illiterate adults. Suddenly she is abducted by a military squad and finds herself accused of subversion and submitted to torture in the hideous underground of the Garage Olimpo, while her mother desperately tries to find her.

Garage Olimpo

1999

Barbed Wire poster
6.3

Harvey, an old man from Scotland lives with his young son and daughter in an isolated house in Patagonia. Upon arrival of the emissaries of a development corporation he promptly stands against them by building a large fence (alambrado). A debut rich with sensibility and violent physicality, an unusual film of wind, isolation, loneliness, desolation ... and madness.

Barbed Wire

1991

Barbed Wire poster
6.3

Harvey, an old man from Scotland lives with his young son and daughter in an isolated house in Patagonia. Upon arrival of the emissaries of a development corporation he promptly stands against them by building a large fence (alambrado). A debut rich with sensibility and violent physicality, an unusual film of wind, isolation, loneliness, desolation ... and madness.

Barbed Wire

1991

Sons And Daughters poster
7.0

We are in Argentina in 1977, a woman gives birth to twins. With the complicity of the midwife he manages to hide the child, second child. The first, a boy, is taken into custody by the regime's guards. The scene moves to the Milan of today. The young Rosa contacts Javier and tries to convince him that they are twin brothers, separated at birth. Thus, the two begin a journey to rediscover their origins and their past. A bitter reality is ready to overwhelm them ...

Sons And Daughters

2002

Sons And Daughters poster
7.0

We are in Argentina in 1977, a woman gives birth to twins. With the complicity of the midwife he manages to hide the child, second child. The first, a boy, is taken into custody by the regime's guards. The scene moves to the Milan of today. The young Rosa contacts Javier and tries to convince him that they are twin brothers, separated at birth. Thus, the two begin a journey to rediscover their origins and their past. A bitter reality is ready to overwhelm them ...

Sons And Daughters

2002

Sons And Daughters poster
7.0

We are in Argentina in 1977, a woman gives birth to twins. With the complicity of the midwife he manages to hide the child, second child. The first, a boy, is taken into custody by the regime's guards. The scene moves to the Milan of today. The young Rosa contacts Javier and tries to convince him that they are twin brothers, separated at birth. Thus, the two begin a journey to rediscover their origins and their past. A bitter reality is ready to overwhelm them ...

Sons And Daughters

2002

Birdwatchers poster
6.1

Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, the present. When a young Guarani-Kaiowá woman commits suicide, Nádio leads his community to form a protest camp on the borders of a local farm that sits on their ancestral burial ground.

Birdwatchers

2008

Birdwatchers poster
6.1

Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, the present. When a young Guarani-Kaiowá woman commits suicide, Nádio leads his community to form a protest camp on the borders of a local farm that sits on their ancestral burial ground.

Birdwatchers

2008

Birdwatchers poster
6.1

Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, the present. When a young Guarani-Kaiowá woman commits suicide, Nádio leads his community to form a protest camp on the borders of a local farm that sits on their ancestral burial ground.

Birdwatchers

2008

Birdwatchers poster
6.1

Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, the present. When a young Guarani-Kaiowá woman commits suicide, Nádio leads his community to form a protest camp on the borders of a local farm that sits on their ancestral burial ground.

Birdwatchers

2008

The Smile of the Leader poster
5.8

Using astounding footage from the Luce archives (newsreels, but also true films) Il sorriso del capo/The Smile of the Leader shows how propaganda works, presents everyday life in its most revealing details, and describes a country's "education". Marco Bechis explores the feeling of consensus: he tells us where it originates, what tools are used to spread it, how it is opposed. The thread running through the film is a voice, enigmatic until the end, narrating in the first person what it is like to grow up under fascism.

The Smile of the Leader

2011

The Smile of the Leader poster
5.8

Using astounding footage from the Luce archives (newsreels, but also true films) Il sorriso del capo/The Smile of the Leader shows how propaganda works, presents everyday life in its most revealing details, and describes a country's "education". Marco Bechis explores the feeling of consensus: he tells us where it originates, what tools are used to spread it, how it is opposed. The thread running through the film is a voice, enigmatic until the end, narrating in the first person what it is like to grow up under fascism.

The Smile of the Leader

2011

The Smile of the Leader poster
5.8

Using astounding footage from the Luce archives (newsreels, but also true films) Il sorriso del capo/The Smile of the Leader shows how propaganda works, presents everyday life in its most revealing details, and describes a country's "education". Marco Bechis explores the feeling of consensus: he tells us where it originates, what tools are used to spread it, how it is opposed. The thread running through the film is a voice, enigmatic until the end, narrating in the first person what it is like to grow up under fascism.

The Smile of the Leader

2011

The Smile of the Leader poster
5.8

Using astounding footage from the Luce archives (newsreels, but also true films) Il sorriso del capo/The Smile of the Leader shows how propaganda works, presents everyday life in its most revealing details, and describes a country's "education". Marco Bechis explores the feeling of consensus: he tells us where it originates, what tools are used to spread it, how it is opposed. The thread running through the film is a voice, enigmatic until the end, narrating in the first person what it is like to grow up under fascism.

The Smile of the Leader

2011

Invisible World poster
5.8

An anthology film following different stories around the theme of invisibility in the modern world.

Invisible World

2013

Invisible World poster
5.8

An anthology film following different stories around the theme of invisibility in the modern world.

Invisible World

2013

The Game Bag poster
7.5

In late summer 1991, three Italians reach a hunting reserve in Croatia with a station wagon. They go to deer, but, unaware of what's in store for months, they do not decipher the enigmatic signs that surround them. One of the three is suddendly wounded in the knee by a bullet of unknown provenance, and they end up in a hotel targeted by snipers night and day.

The Game Bag

1997

Il rumore della memoria poster
NR

A documentary film that recounts the life of Vera Vigevani Jarach, through a firsthand account of two experiences that, over time and in different places, shaped her life, confronting her under two different dictatorships that made deportation and physical elimination commonplace: Nazism and Fascism and the Argentine dictatorship. The disappearance of her daughter Franca inspired Vera to become a founder of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and a "memory activist," touring Italy and Argentina to tell her two stories, ensuring that these horrors never happen again.

Il rumore della memoria

2014