It began in 1954, founded by Jesus Miller during the presidency of Juan Peron, though in that first incarnation it was not a competition at all - simply a showcase of selected international films under the name Festival Cinematografico Internacional. The choice of venue was deliberate: Mar del Plata was already the nation's glamour capital, the place where Buenos Aires went to be seen, and a film festival on its beaches married the movies to the sea air. The stars came anyway. In the early years the resort welcomed names from Hollywood's golden age: Mary Pickford, the pioneering actress and studio founder; Edward G. Robinson; Errol Flynn; the Italian sensation Gina Lollobrigida. In 1959 the Argentine Film Critics Association took the reins, and the festival earned its FIAPF recognition. For a brief, glittering window, a beach town in Argentina was a fixture on the world's cinema map.

Then the interruptions began. In 1964 the festival decamped to Buenos Aires under a new name. A military coup struck Argentina in 1966. From 1967 to 1969 it went dark, edged out by rival festivals in Rio de Janeiro. And yet, even through the turbulence of the 1960s, the guest lists stayed extraordinary - Paul Newman, Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Francois Truffaut, Toshiro Mifune, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the opera diva Maria Callas, the Mexican comic Cantinflas, the Polish master Andrzej Wajda. After the 1970 edition, the festival was canceled outright as Argentina slid toward the repressive military dictatorship that ruled from 1976 to 1983. For a quarter of a century, the country's great film festival did not exist. Attempts to revive it failed, one after another.

Resurrection finally came in 1996. The festival returned, renovated, and slowly found its footing again - though even its calendar wandered, held in March from 2001 to 2007 before settling into its current November slot in 2008. With that revival came the prize that crowned it: Category A status, FIAPF's highest, restoring Mar del Plata as the most important film festival in Latin America. In 2004 its top award was given a name that belongs entirely to this city. The Astor honors Astor Piazzolla, the revolutionary tango composer born in Mar del Plata - a Golden Astor for Best Film and Silver Astores for direction, acting and screenplay. Today the festival runs four competitions: International, Latin American, Argentine, and the experimental Altered States, the last a window onto cinema's stranger frontiers.

The struggle did not end with the dictatorship. The festival is organized by INCAA, Argentina's National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts, and it lives and dies by public support for the arts. In March 2024, the government suspended state funding to INCAA as part of sweeping cuts to cultural subsidies, throwing the festival's future into doubt once more. It is a familiar position for an event that has spent seventy years proving that a national cinema can be starved but not easily killed. That a beach resort on the far edge of the South Atlantic still holds a seat among the great festivals of the world is, in its way, a small act of defiance repeated every November.