MIRAJ: The Moving Image Review & Art Journal - Current Issue

This article centres on Inside Downtown (2001), the final moving image work by the Cuban filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián. In collaboration with Jorge Egusquiza Zorrilla, the documentary is the filmmaker’s only audio-visual work produced from exile in Miami. Taking Inside Downtown as a starting point, the article will explore the intermedial ‘dialogue’ between the filmmaker’s work as a painter and his cinematic oeuvre. This intermedial dialogue allows us to construct a continuity in Guillén Landrián’s creative practice, where previous critics have instead detected a gap or ‘silence’ in his cinematographic work. I will argue that the encounter between cinema and painting also acts as a conceptual space to consider the temporal intervention enacted by restoration as a collective and individual ritual.

Since 2009, Cine en Femenino has been the most important showcase of the work of women filmmakers in Colombia. The festival was created by Mujer es audiovisual, a production and distribution collective spearheaded by the filmmaker Jimena Prieto. This article is an account on how submission in optical media and other materials became an accidental archive that documents the participation of women, their setbacks and achievements in the audiovisual industry. In recent years, multiple collective efforts have supported the preservation of Cine en Femenino collections to ensure that this production is reinserted into debates on cinema studies, gender and women’s studies, feminism and fields related to the content of the films. Writing from our diverse experience and as organizers and participants in the archival project, we trace back the history of Cine en Femenino and discuss how local and international support, practices such as community archiving and participatory practices have advanced archival work. The challenges and questions raised during the process might encourage other communities of creators to consider non-traditional practices to safeguard materials, encouraging considerations of the archive as an organic component of individual or collective practices since the very moment of inception of artistic practices.

This article takes up Amy Villarejo’s question about the costs of lesbian visibility, including the risk of commodification and the tendency to frame lesbian identity as stable and easily readable. It explores how contemporary Brazilian cinema articulates lesbian existence in ways that resist such reductive constructions. We argue that lesbian desire activates other senses (not only sight and sound) in the filmic experience, creating an audio-visual landscape we call bodylands. The term bodylands is inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of borderlands, which evokes a collective, plural and unstable experience of bordering. In our reading, Anzaldúa’s border becomes a body: a body of cinematic works, the body of the film and the body of the spectator. Bodylands thus refers to the dynamic interplay between the lesbian character’s body, the filmic body and the viewer’s body. A number of recent Brazilian short films construct their own bodylands as a means of resisting dominant narratives of isolation and political disillusionment. These films reimagine lesbian existence through associations with non-human elements such as water, fire and earth, generating bodylands as multisensorial modes of perceiving and experiencing lesbian desire. In doing so, they propose alternative imaginaries of lesbian life within the Brazilian context. This article, then, delineates ways of thinking lesbian existence in Brazilian cinema beyond the framework of in/visibility understood merely in terms of the gaze and representation – whether as portrayal or as proxy.

This article examines how two Central American films – Rosa: Historia de una transexual (Rosa: Love Blooms in the Darkest Places) (2006) and Abrázame como antes (Hold Me Like Before) (2016) – portray the lives of trans women who search for a lost community from which they have been historically excluded. Drawing on Didier Eribon’s reflections on exclusion, social verdicts, the politics of friendship and resubjectivation, the analysis highlights how the protagonists seek to reconstitute affective bonds through chosen families, everyday intimacy and gestures of care. The street, gay bars and the home function as symbolic spaces of reappropriation, sites where trans subjects resist hegemonic norms and imagine new forms of belonging. Eribon’s framework provides a central lens for understanding how these characters pursue not a return to normativity, but a reinsertion into the social order through alternative communal ties. Ultimately, these films offer counter-narratives that envision survival as a political and affective project grounded in relational reconstruction.

Review of: Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure, Dan Guthrie, curated by Carmen Juliá and Olivia Aherne, Spike Island, Bristol, 8 February–11 May 2025 and Chisenhale Gallery, London, 6 June–24 August 2025

Review of: Darcy Lange, Videography as Social Practice, Mercedes Vicente (2024)

Palgrave Macmillan, 278 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-03136-905-6, p/bk, £109.99

Review of: Buttercup, Sarah Browne, curated by Miguel Amado, Sirius Art Centre, Cobh, Co. Cork, Ireland, 13 April–29 June 2024