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TEACHER, NANO BALBO AND POPULAR EDUCATION

MAESTRO, NANO BALBO Y LA EDUCACIÓN POPULAR

By Juan MASCARÓ

Documentary - Production 2022

“We must develop a pedagogy of the question. We hear a pedagogy of the answer. The teachers answer questions that the students have not asked ”Paulo Freire. The film accompanies the pedagogue Nano Balbo through a nomadic present, walking curiously along the paths of popular education.

- Year of production
- 2022
- Genres
- Documentary, Road movie, Biography
- Countries
- ARGENTINA
- Languages
- SPANISH-ARGENTINE
- Budget
- 0 - 0.3 M$
- Duration
- 85 mn
- Director(s)
- Juan MASCARÓ
- Cast
- Orlando Nano BALBO
- Producer(s)
- Juan MASCARÓ (Cine Bandido), Duilio GATTI (CINE BANDIDO)
- Synopsis
- Orlando Balbo lives a nomadic present at 74 years old, curiously walking along the paths of popular education in Argentina. It crosses different human geographies and evokes founding moments in his life, like vignettes from the past that filter into the present and mix with the existence of students and teachers to cement a pedagogy of experience.
  
  Nano was born in the Argentine Pampean plain. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire was his working model, and popular education his field of action. On March 24, 1976, the day of the coup that established a dictatorship in Argentina, Balbo was kidnapped and transferred to a police station, where he was tortured. He later managed to go into exile, but had lost part of his hearing due to torture. Upon his return to the country, he resumed his work in an original Mapuche community.
  
  Nano listens less and less and has gradually left the classrooms to give talks from the publication of his own life, novelized by the writer Guillermo Saccomanno, in the book "Un maestro" (2011), stories where the question of learning becomes always central. Each day of his life is crossed by the need for a dialogue with others, which escapes with his growing inability to hear.
  
  "Maestro" is a film-journey where schools, chairs, popular high schools, and social movements are scenarios of the inexhaustible capacity to be surprised and surrender to new questions from our teacher, whose main contradiction is to promote a pedagogy of the question, without being able to listen .
  The camera moves and walks with Nano, it looks through him, but also through us, as we seek dialogue with him and discuss our film, where Balbo's story is being built in the present and, at the same time, in a living past that is rescued by teachers and students. What do their lives have in common with Nano's? How do these points of contact work when staging your memories?
  The sound of the film aims to “listen to the world from Nano”, a fragmented and layered world, especially in moments where our protagonist reflects and remembers.
  We established three lines of argument that advance in parallel.
  
  The first corresponds to historical memory: Nano's memories. It appears from a causal jump to the past, or from a fleeting memory triggered by a space or action experienced by Nano.
  The second is the present nomad of Balbus. One morning our traveling teacher gets up and puts on his hearing aid, patiently waiting for the appearance of the “audible world”. A group takes him along a route and a group of people receive him in a remote place to listen to his story.
  The third plot line is our encounters with the teacher to build the film. How to film the dialogue? How is popular education played in the cinema we make?
  
  History conflicts with knowing-learning and dialogue.