Luis Puenzo, an Argentine film director whose “The Official Story,” based on the yearslong “dirty war” in which Argentina’s military regime killed and disappeared thousands of people it perceived as its enemies, brought his country its first Academy Award for best foreign language film, died on Tuesday in Buenos Aires. He was 80.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Lucia Puenzo, a director and writer, who said the cause was cancer but did not say where in the Argentine capital city he died.
From 1976 to 1983, Argentina’s right-wing junta rounded up thousands of real and presumed leftists, imprisoned them in torture camps, killed them and disposed of their bodies, some of which were tossed from airplanes. Human rights groups estimate that up to 30,000 people — known as “los desaparecidos” — were disappeared during those years.
During this period of terror, Mr. Puenzo was especially fearful for one of his sons, who at one point had an anti-junta slogan on his school bag.
“I called him an idiot and told him to throw out the bag,” Mr. Puenzo recalled in a 1985 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle. “I was afraid. They could have taken him away forever. But I felt a contradiction because all my life, I taught him my own values, and then I told him to do the contrary.”
Mr. Puenzo had quietly begun writing the script for “La Historia Oficial” (“The Official Story”) even before the regime crumbled in the aftermath of Argentina’s 1982 surrender to the United Kingdom in the Falklands War. Rather than a sweeping narrative, he chose to make a domestic drama.
“Our problems were like an iceberg,” Mr. Puenzo told The Chronicle. The disappearances were “the most painful,” but, he added, “everything in daily life was really part of one subject.”
He and Aída Bortnik, a journalist and screenwriter, created an intimate story about a history teacher (played by Norma Aleandro) who gradually learns that the daughter she adopted with her wealthy, junta-connected husband (Héctor Alterio) was stolen from a woman who had been disappeared.
It was a work of fiction, but based on the truth: Hundreds of children are believed to have been stolen from disappeared parents and given to regime sympathizers and government officials.
Mr. Puenzo originally intended to shoot the film in secret, using hidden cameras. But the regime fell as he and Ms. Bortnik were finishing the script, and he was able to make it openly on location in Buenos Aires.
“The Official Story” opened in 1985 to rave reviews, but it was even more important to Mr. Puenzo that the film was seen in a newly democratic society.
“It was wonderful, after so many years of censorship and people being afraid to express themselves,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1985, “to stand outside the theater in Buenos Aires and listen to the people coming out of the theater, discussing the movie, arguing among themselves.”
In The New York Times, the critic Walter Goodman called “The Official Story” a “glowing film” that is “unwaveringly committed to human rights, yet it imposes no ideology or doctrine.” In her Los Angeles Times review, Sheila Benson praised it as “elegantly persuasive and haunting.”
At the Cannes Film Festival, Ms. Aleandro won the award for best actress (which she shared with Cher, for “Mask”). “The Official Story” also won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, an independent, interfaith honor given at Cannes and other major film festivals.
In addition to the Academy Award for best foreign language film (now best international feature film) — a category Argentina won again in 2010 for the crime drama “The Secret in Their Eyes” — Mr. Puenzo and Ms. Bortnik were nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay.
Luis Adalberto Puenzo was born on Feb. 19, 1946, in Buenos Aires. His mother, Audolina Monzón Puenzo, was a teacher, and his father, Luis Salvador Puenzo, was a dentist. According to Mr. Puenzo’s biographer, Ricardo García Oliveri, his parents gave him a 16-millimeter camera as a birthday present because he was interested in film from an early age.
In the 1960s, he worked as a draftsman at an advertising agency and later formed a production company to make short films and commercials for companies like Levi’s and Crespi wine.
His first feature film, which he wrote and directed, was “Luces de Mis Zapatos” (“Lights on My Shoes,” 1973), which he followed two years later by directing one of the three segments in the comedy “Las Sorpresas” (“The Surprises”)).
The success of “The Official Story” led the actress Jane Fonda and the producer Lois Bonfiglio to hire Mr. Puenzo to direct “Old Gringo” (1989).
Based on a novel by Carlos Fuentes, with a screenplay by Mr. Puenzo and Ms. Bortnik, it tells the story of the acerbic American writer Ambrose Bierce (Gregory Peck), who travels to Mexico in 1910, during the Mexican Revolution. There, he intersects with a spinsterish teacher (Ms. Fonda) who gets involved in revolutionary turmoil and falls in love with a Mexican general (Jimmy Smits).
There was some doubt in Hollywood whether Mr. Puenzo, whose experience consisted mainly of commercial work and a modest (if acclaimed) feature, could direct on a broader canvas, and in English.
“I had to turn a switch and change the scale of what I had been doing in ‘The Official Story,’” Mr. Puenzo told The New York Times in 1989, “and use to the maximum all the experience I had acquired in spending my life filming.”
The movie’s release was delayed as the studio demanded cuts. “It’s not a film one can be entirely happy with,” Mr. Puenzo added, “but I’m happy with some parts, and I stand by it and sign my name to it.”
It flopped with audiences and critics.
After “Old Gringo,” Mr. Puenzo continued to direct for film and television, including “The Plague,” a 1992 English-language feature adaptation of Albert Camus’s novel that starred William Hurt, Robert Duvall, Sandrine Bonnaire and Raul Julia; produced films, including some directed by his daughter, Lucia, and his son Nicolas; and served as president of the National Institute of Film and Audiovisual Arts, known as INCAA, which promotes and funds films in Argentina.
His marriage to Nora Lía Rousseaux ended in divorce, but they remained close. In addition to his son and daughter, Mr. Puenzo is survived by two other sons, Esteban, an editor and producer, and Sebastián, a cinematographer; and five grandchildren.
When “The Official Story” won the Oscar, on March 24, 1986, Ms. Aleandro was one of the presenters. After opening the envelope, she exclaimed, “God bless you!”
Mr. Puenzo’s acceptance speech was solemn.
“I cannot forget that on another March 24, 10 years ago, like this day, we suffered the last military coup in my country,” he said. “We will never forget this nightmare, but we are starting now to begin with our newest dreams.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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