Manuel NIETO ZAS

Manuel Nieto Zas was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1972. He graduated in media studies from the Catholic University of Uruguay. After working in TV for some time, he co-directed the short film Nico & Parker in the year 2000. Since then, he has worked as assistant director in several films with like 25 Watts and Whisky by Rebella & Stoll, Los Muertos and Liverpool by Lisandro Alonso and Hamaca Paraguaya by Paz Encina. His opera prima La Perrera, shoted in 16mm in three different stages along 2004, is the tragicomic chronicle of a year of a young bourgeois slacker whose father forces to build a house in a small town near the ocean. A year full of clashes with construction workers, disloyal ex girlfriends, mixed up hippies, and other indefinable characters. All surrounded by pot smoke, alcohol, confusion, and hallucinogenic mushrooms. In it world premiere the film won the VPRO Tiger Award in Rotterdam International Film Festival 2006. Nieto is now working in his new film, El lugar del hijo. It is a story about rootless and personal reconstruction. It is also a portrait of a numbed youth in a country lacking opportunities, where leftist militancy has replaced the folk music for rock’n’roll, and intellectuals for lumpen mass.