“Argentina has a serious problem with memory,” he tells the Herald following a brief tour of the archive he has named Filmoteca Buenos Aires. Peña is also the film curator at Malba museum and runs a self-managed festival named ‘Bazofi’ (a pun on the Buenos Aires film festival’s acronym, Bafici), where he shows all sorts of rarities from his collection. A state-managed, well-funded facility to preserve, restore, and exhibit the country’s vast film production, which, sadly, is mostly lost forever. Peña’s thorough detective work tracked it down and finally found it, unidentified, in the Buenos Aires Film Museum. The first Argentine film law passed by Congress in 1999 actually declared the country in a state of “film heritage emergency”.
