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Gender, Sexuality, Film, and Media in Latin America: Challenging Representation and Structures

March 2021 Issue Editors: Kristi M. Wilson and Clara Garavelli This special issue of LAP engages the often under-recognized role of Latin American women and queer film/video-makers, as well as the cultural impact of gender and sexuality norms on film and other media. Contributors in this issue explore what it means to gaze back (cinematically) at Latin American history. The essays address such themes as: increasing inequality, environmental degradation, decoloniality, indigeneity, activism, gender politics and queer narratives.   TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE [/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

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ROMA

ROMA (film dossier) 2018 drama film written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón By: Erynn Masi de Casanova (full story - click here) World-famous director Alfonso Cuarón’s film Roma, which recently won the Golden Globe for Best Picture and is nominated in 10 Academy Award categories, shines a light on a figure who is often invisible: the domestic worker. Called empleada, muchacha, chica, and worse, these workers, ubiquitous in Latin American cities , labor in conditions of exploitation that are not seen in other occupations. According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), nearly 30% of domestic workers in the world are explicitly excluded from national labor laws. Even when they do have rights guaranteed by law, these are not usually enforced. Latin America is home to 27% of the world’s domestic workers, and in recent years, several Latin American films have addressed the situation of domestic workers in the households where they work. Yet none has received the degree of attention and acclaim that Roma has. As film critics, audiences, and domestic worker advocates weigh in on Roma in the run-up to the Oscars later this month, the voices of the experts who conduct research on domestic work in the region have been [...]

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Solutions from Below (film review)

Pedagogical Documentaries and Praxis By: Kristi M. Wilson and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli (full story - click here) Alejandro Ramírez Anderson Tierralismo: Stories from a Cooperative Farm, 2013. José Cohen H2Omx, 2013. En este valle verdusco, antes corrían ríos rutilantes, cenizos, castaños y cárdenos, púrpuras, perdidos y pardos; quebrajosos, vocingleros, berreando bajaban de la mon-taña humeante, salían a los llanos lerdos, tentaban a la temprana Tenochtitlán. Hoy van mugiendo entubados, menguados, pesados de aguas negras, crecidos de mierda; ríos sin riberas, risibles, con riendas, rabiosos, rabones, ruidosos de coches; avanzando a tumbos por la ciudad desflorada, desembocando en los lagos letales, y en el marcado mar, que ya no los ama. —Homero Aridjis Part of the rich documentary film tradition includes pedagogical films. The best of these documentaries successfully incorporate the strange combination of artistic and pedagogical innovation in their efforts to educate and encourage audiences to bring about social change. In the past decade, a new type of documentary about sustainability has made itself a prominent feature of sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Facebook. These documentaries vary in quality and length, from feature-length films about activists who oppose the depletion of natural resources to instructional videos about how to build an [...]

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You Never Know What You Are Filming (film review)

Art, Mentorship, and States of Siege By: Kristi M. Wilson (full story - click here) Miguel Ángel Vidaurre Marker ’72: Cartography of a Faceless Filmmaker. Chile, 2012. Marker ’72: Cartography of a Faceless Filmmaker, produced by Factoría Espectra, is an essay-style documentary about the groundbreaking French filmmaker Chris Marker’s encounter with Salvador Allende’s Chile in 1972, his subse-quent mentorship of Chilean director Patricio Guzmán (The Battle of Chile), and his impact on the Chilean film community after the military coup of 1973. A legendary recluse and the director of enigmatic film classics such as La Jetée (1962), A Grin Without a Cat (1977), Sans Soleil (1983), and AK (1985), Marker arrived in Chile as part of the production team for the filming of Costa-Gavras’s political thriller State of Siege. According to Guzmán, in spite of the fact that State of Siege turned out to be one of the largest film productions in Chilean his-tory, Marker had not come to film anything with Costa-Gavras; “he just wanted to see Chile.” Allende’s victory brought well-known people from around the world to Chile. As the documentary filmmaker and director of the Chilean School of Cinema Carlos Flores jokingly suggests in the film, Chile [...]

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Children of the Diaspora: For Peace and Democracy (featured film)

Children of the Diaspora: For Peace and Democracy (2013), a film directed by Jennifer Cárcamo and produced with the support of the Centro de la Memoria Histórica Salvadoreña, documents the journey of a group of university students from California to El Salvador, the homeland of their parents and for some of them their own birthplace. The students are members of the Unión Salvadoreña de Estudiantes Universitarios, a transnational organization committed to political consciousness-raising among Salvadoran youth. The film documents the group’s trip to El Salvador as part of a delegation invited to observe the 2009 presidential campaign. This election, in which Mauricio Funes won the presidency, would turn out to be historical because, for the first time, a member of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional won the office. The opening sequence of the film, set to Silvio Rodriguez’s “Sueño con Serpientes,” makes the goals of Cárcamo’s project clear: to gather the evolving perspectives of this group of young students (from schools such as the University of California and the California State University system) as they confront the troubled narratives and, in some cases, the historical lacunae passed down from their parents. In their testimonies, many of the students describe the climate of fear in which they grew up, especially around the topic [...]

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Force and Meaning Political Hauntings in Two Contemporary Brazilian Films (film review)

By: Kristi M. Wilson (full story - click here) According to Avery Gordon, sociological hauntings can take a range of forms, from lost personal artifacts to decaying archival material to people living in the wake of dispossession and repression. Two Brazilian films from 2012, Neighboring Sounds/O som ao redor, a fiction film directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, and Elena, a documentary directed by Petra Costa, explore this idea of hauntings from different moments of the political past: colonialism and the last dictatorship, respectively. They represent collisions between the force of the past and its meaning in the present across a range of Brazilian chronoscapes—historical changes and recurrences that impact race, gender, and class relations and speak to the widening chasm of social inequality, continually reinventing itself for the times. Neighboring Sounds was featured at the 2013 Latin American Studies Association film festival. Neighboring Sounds explores notions of past and present violence under the surface of the increasingly privatized and policed urban landscape of Recife, a Portuguese colonial settlement with a painful history of slavery and sugar barons. Elena is a poetic documentary about loss, memory, and exile (from home and self). Born at the tail end of the dictatorship to [...]

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El edificio de los Chilenos (featured film)

Macarena Aguiló’s debut documentary The Chilean Building (Magic Lantern Films, 2010) takes up an often neglected aspect of the organized struggles against the Pinochet dictatorship. The film reminds us that when young militants went underground to organize armed resistance, they made enormous sacrifices to protect their children (often targets of the repression) that sometimes entailed a radical challenge to their roles as parents. Aguiló tells the story of a group of more than 60 children who were put in the care of surrogate parents, first in Europe and then in Cuba. The biological parents belonged to the same political organization, the MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario), and, as the film discloses, had lengthy debates about the pros and cons of leaving their children temporarily while they carried on the struggle. The film interviews reveal profound meditations on familial responsibilities and political commitment and thoughts about the damaging role of conservative institutions and practices on the education of children. They also deal with the profound disappointment of the revolutionaries and their children upon returning to a politically divided Chile. The fact that this remarkable story is told from a first-person perspective generates rich historical readings. As a small child, Macarena Aguiló was kidnapped [...]

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The Outsiders Pathways of Migratory Experience in Latin American Films (film review)

In the past several decades the theme of migration has continually recurred in the cinema of and about Latin America, and it is not difficult to see why it is a popular topic in a region characterized by rapid upheavals in political, economic, and cultural circumstances. In the midst of flux and change, movement is transformed into something more than an urgent necessity. It is a reflex; it becomes one of the few ways that one can make sense of the ever-shifting world. Indeed, we can even speak of the aesthetics of migration itself and suggest that cinema is well suited to depicting and contemplating that experience of traversal within and across national borders; the medium is capable of capturing grand vistas and broad swaths of space and time, along with attending to the minute details of daily life and daily struggle. The more familiar manifestations of this theme come with the cycle of films, almost a subgenre unto themselves, that chronicle the danger-filled journeys of migrants toward the global North. In films like El norte (1983) and Sin nombre (2009) the border between Mexico and the United States serves as a kind of finish line at the end of a perilous [...]

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Migration, Regional Traditions, and the Intricacy of Documentary Representation in Cuates de Australia and La chica del sur (film review)

By: Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli Approaches to telling a story are, of course, abundant. Latin American filmmakers borrow from all kinds of artistic traditions—literature, pop music, the plastic arts, home movies, etc. What makes this borrowing both draining and stimulating is that the web offers an excess of examples to draw from. Further, digital production and online distribution are cultivating a new kinship among filmmakers, visual traditions, and viewers across the world. This is a daunting realization that the current crop of young filmmakers is trying to grapple with. Two recent documentary films from Mexico and Argentina bring the topic of social and cultural migration into focus, giving international audiences the opportunity to enter otherwise inaccessible worlds. Cuates de Australia (Drought) from Mexico and La chica del sur (The Girl from the South) from Argentina display contrasting approaches to portraying the hardships of relocation. Both documentaries follow their protagonists’ journeys from the place they call home to an unfamiliar land and their bittersweet return. Cuates de Australia, directed by Everardo González, is an enigmatic film. It goes out of its way to remain removed from its subject, but it cannot help but become enamored of its own rendition of it. This essential quality works in the film’s favor, since it creates sequences of great tenderness and anguish. [...]

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Homo artis, Homo laborans, and Homo politicus – The Pursuit of Redemption in Three Recent Argentine Films (film review)

By: Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli One cannot be short of themes while there is still plenty of reality. Any hour of the day, any place, any person, is a subject for narrative if the narrator is capable of observing and illuminating all these collective elements by exploring their interior value. —Cesare Zavattini Armando Bo’s feature film debut The Last Elvis (El último Elvis) is a refreshing addition to recent Argentine releases. Bo is the grandson of Armando Bo Senior, the director of the soft-porn pulp classics of Isabel “La Coca” Sarli (Fiebre, 1972, and Carne, 1968). He appears to share his grandfather’s fascination with the malcontent antiheroes that are ever present in our bustling Latin American cities. The Last Elvis follows the misadventures of Carlos Gutiérrez (John McInerny) over a period of a few days. Carlos makes his living impersonating Elvis Presley, singing at private parties and neighborhood fairs. During the day Carlos (who insists on being called “Elvis,” as if the name were a title of nobility) works in an appliance factory. It is unclear whether he and his fellow workers on the line are assembling new appliances or refurbishing outmoded ones. His factory job speaks volumes about his own path as [...]

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Latin American Perspectives, founded in 1974, is a theoretical and scholarly journal for discussion and debate on the political economy of capitalism, imperialism, and socialism in the Americas. Most issues focus on a single problem, nation, or region, providing an in-depth look from participants and scholars throughout the Americas.

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