Today is a decade after the death of Leonardo Favioan artist with all the letters, a unique figure, at least for Argentine cinema.

Favio was a man whose consistency and integrity never got out of his head. Like your scarves.

Many recognize in him his talent as a director or performer – the latter was what he liked least and acting was the place where he felt most uncomfortable – in several classic films of Leopold Torre Nilssonbut if Favio achieved popular notoriety it was not for that.

Because Leonardo Favio became an idol and became popular not for his films, but first for his music.

In 1968 he recorded the single you were mine one summer, a success that crossed the borders of Argentina and exploded throughout Latin America. Yes, as many will remember, the lyrics were about you and not about you.

He only starred in a couple of musical films, and he did just a rosereleased in September 1971, which made it even more popular.

“When I sing, I don’t make films …”

“When I sing I don’t make films and when I make films I don’t sing … But I’m passionate about both, I like them,” he could say.

He did not study music or film in an organized or academic way. Self-taught like another popular inland musician, like Tucuman Ramon “Palito” Ortega, Favio was the natural child of the generation of the 60s, or one of the many Cinema Nuovo Argentino that has been and will be in the history of our cinematography. Favio, Kohn, Antín, from different angles, came to break with the so-called commercial and stagnant national cinema, so their passage in the European marquees would have been almost guaranteed.

And just as he did not have a father figure to follow, he found his artistic father in Leopoldo Torre Nilsson.

“I never noticed that movies had a director. I didn’t know what a director was. For me, in films, there were only actors and the actors created them. “Favio was not interested in international film festivals. Not even his most emblematic films went to the screens of Cannes, Venice or Berlin. But he won in Trieste, Cartagena and Mar del Plata.

I have had the pleasure and the good fortune of interviewing Favio on several occasions. And sometimes we went to eat in Chiquilín, on the corner of Sarmiento and Montevideo, one block from Corrientes Avenue. He always had a table reserved for two. And it wasn’t just about cinema, because in the 90s, when I chatted more with him, he was with nothing less than cat the monkey Y Perón, symphony of feelingswhich took much longer than he could have imagined.

Favio was a simple boy in his speech, who always, always found a poetic outlet to conclude a sentence, or seemed mischievous when he was about to discover that he was telling a white lie.

Everyone will save an image, a color, a text from their films. From the trilogy of Chronicle of a lonely boy, The novel of Aniceto and Francisca Y Employeeshot in the 1960s and in black and white, it leapt to the color and blood red of Giovanni Moreirathe film that quickly leaped from the theaters to the screen of Canale 13. It premiered together with the inauguration to the presidency of the Nation by Héctor J. Cámpora, with the return to power of Peronism.

“I’m not a Peronist director, I’m a Peronist who makes films … At no time am I going to go over the line through my art, because I’m afraid poetry will escape me,” he said.

For many years it had the highest-grossing Argentine film in history. Nazareno Cruz and the wolfwith Juan José Camero, Alfredo Alcón and the theme Sunnywas the adaptation of a radio drama – such as those in which Leonardo himself began acting -, and its millions of viewers would only be surpassed by wild talesby Damián Szifron, between its premiere in 2014 and its Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 2015.

Those were other times: in the 70s, cinema in the United States saw with bad eyes the (re) emergence of local cinema, which attracted more and more spectators and took screens away from Hollywood productions. But Favio’s films, like Giovanni Moreira Y Nazarenethey triumphed.

The saying. Favio there was only one, it is unrepeatable. And how he misses it.