Argentina

The Argentinean film co-produced by Pedro Almodovar is up for an Oscar for best foreign language film. It features a drunk teenager who runs over a woman and an angry bride at a glitzy Jewish wedding.

Anthropologist and co-founder of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, Mercedes Doretti. The group was founded in 1984 to investigate the fate of persons who had been “disappeared” by the former Argentinean military regime. The team consisting of an anthropologist, pathologist, radiologist, ballistic expert, and an archaeologist exhume grave sites, and the sites of massacres to determine the truth behind what happened, and to identify skeletal remains. Since their initial work in Argentina, the EAAF has worked in many other countries to investigate human rights abuses.

Astor Piazzolla died Sunday at the age of 71. He was an Argentinian composer whose updated tangos were a hybrid of classical music, jazz and rock. He was also a gifted player of the bandoneon, a kind of accordion that gives tango its distinctive sound. Piazzola had suffered a stroke nearly two years ago, from which he never recovered. We present a rebroadcast of our 1988 interview with him.

Book critic John Leonard reviews Alberto Manguel's novel, "News From a Foreign Country Came," about families and terrorism in cities around the world.

World music aficionado Milo Miles explores the world of the new tango, and reviews the latest album from the new tango's leading proponent, Argentinian accordionist Astor Piazzolla.

Tango innovator Astor Piazzolla. Since the early 60s, Piazzolla has been leading groups that play an updated tango that connects this Argentinian form with the musical innovations from Europe and America, both classical and contemporary. The adjustments have earned him the enmity of Argentinians, and for most of the 70s he lived in France where he wrote film scores. Piazzolla is a classically trained composer who wrote symphonies and studied with Nadia Boulanger, the renown French instructor of composition.