Educational Media Reviews Online

The 1958 documentary short, Tire Di'e (Throw a Dime) depicts the children of a shantytown outside Santa Fe, Argentina as they run after a train and shout at the passengers to throw them a dime. At the end of the film, a woman says her son is too little to chase after the train. The viewer got the feeling, though, that it wouldn’t be long before that child would end up doing that very thing. And as the 1998 video Los Pibes de la pelicula (The Kids in the Movie) shows, kids in the area are still asking for money from passengers in vehicles forty years later. The main difference is that they are now soliciting coins from the drivers of automobiles rather than train riders.

Los Pibes revisits the people featured in Tire Di'e. Director Pablo Ramazza interviews many of those who appeared in the earlier film, both the now-grown “kids” and their parents, and finds that forty years hasn’t brought a wholesale improvement in their lives.

As one man puts it, “There is more poverty now than before, but it is hardly noticed. Because everyone has a little house, his own little room.” But even though the shelter situation is better, unemployment is still rampant, and residents have to earn money anyone they can. Some have turned to robbing others. Gunfire, from gangs fighting each other, and from the police shooting at suspects, is prevalent. Kids feel they have to carry firearms for protection.

Ramazza cuts between clips of the kids in Tire Di'e running after the train and footage shot in the 1990s of kids running up to cars asking for money or cleaning the cars’ windows and hoping to get a few coins for the job. At the end, he includes the final scene of the earlier film and then has a freeze-frame of a present-day boy about the same age, which makes for a lingering question: will this cycle of poverty continue for more generations?

Los Pibes is recommended as a supplementary purchase to Tire Di'e, rather than as a stand-alone acquisition. Latin American Video Archives has released the two simultaneously. Tire Di'e benefits from a restored picture and soundtrack and has historical significance as an early example of a new Latin American cinema. Los Pibes’ brief running time doesn’t allow for an in-depth exploration of why things are still so bad. It mainly serves as a sad coda to the original work.