Born in Leon in Spain, Octavio Getino moved to Argentina in the early 1950s. Here, he co-founded, along with the director Fernando Solanos, the influential and radical film collective known as Cinema Liberacion, and worked with Solanos on the film 'The Hour of the Furnaces', which was largely shot underground and clandestinely. Following the return of Peron as the president of Argentina in the mid 1970s he was made the Argentinian film censor, which allowed him to relax the strict artistic regime, but he was soon displaced by a harsher incumbent. He then moved to Peru to work as a teacher of film theory, resisting efforts to extradite him to Argentina, In the 1980s he moved to Mexico.