celebrated statue of Christopher Columbus were stolen for their value as scrap metal. When truancy rates dropped at primary schools around the country, it was because the children didn't want to miss out on what was often the only meal of their day.

The crisis was indiscriminate. Overnight, the educated, European-minded middle-class became nouveaux pauvres. For one businessman in his fifties who had owned three perfume shops before the crash, this meant driving a taxi from five in the morning to eight at night. Well-dressed women took pots and pans to bang in protest on the streets where they used to shop. Second-hand furniture shops filled up with ornate mahogany tables, chandeliers and Art Deco antiques - family treasures now going for a pittance.

With jobs unattainable or paying barely anything, the enterprising

young either escaped to Spain and Italy, the countries from which their grandparents had emigrated, or got menial work serving burgers or selling clothes. Meanwhile, just as had happened in Prague in the 1990s, filmmakers, writers and artists from around the world rented studio apartments for a third of the price they would have paid back home. Enclaves of Buenos Aires with names like Palermo Hollywood and Palermo Soho quickly became cosmopolitan and trendy.

The success of the film industry was a rare positive. Just as the post-war depression in Italy spawned Neo-realism and films such as Bicycle Thieves, a new wave of Argentine directors started making personal cinema which examined how ordinary people responded to reduced circumstances. One such, Carlos Sorin's Bombon El Perro, tells the tale of a jobless mechanic who regains his lost pride when