Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Volume 21, Issue 2, 2024

La Sirga (The Towrope) (Vega 2012) has become a highly representative film for contemporary Colombian cinema. In this article, I address two topics that have not yet been fully explored in the critical analyses of the movie: its use of secrets as aesthetic devices and its portrayal of the Colombian people. With the help of different theoretical tools, including Gonzalo Aguilar’s views on the relationship between Latin American cinema and the concept of the people, Clare Birchall’s approach to the aesthetic potential of secrets, Ernesto Laclau’s definition of the people as a political category and an assessment of the right-wing populist project led by President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, I show that, through a suggestive use of secrets throughout the film, Vega produces a critique of Uribe Vélez’s political discourse and, especially, of his definitions of the Colombian people at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Following the Uruguayan civic-military dictatorship (1973–85), the democratic government passed the Expiry Law, which prevented investigations into human rights violations. While successive governments have slowly made progress over time, impunity prevails in Uruguay even today. Despite this, Uruguayan filmmakers engage with the memory of the dictatorship in their films to call for truth and justice in a political context that has remained committed to the so-called peace and reconciliation model of transitional justice. This article demonstrates how two Uruguayan feature films depict the fight for truth in post-dictatorship Uruguay: Matar a todos (Kill Them All) (Schroeder 2007) and Zanahoria (Carrot) (Buchichio 2014). They offer distinct perspectives about Uruguay’s transition to democracy and the lasting effects of impunity, thus serving as particularly interesting case studies for showing how filmmakers intervene in discourses on democratic transitions. Even though both films were produced in the twenty-first century, they depict Uruguayan transitional justice as an unfinished project by ending without any definitive conclusions. I argue that by leaving the stories open-ended, these films reveal an expectation that truth and justice are yet to come.

Discussion of Brazilian-born filmmakers who have worked in Britain is generally limited to the work of Alberto Cavalcanti. However, an extension of government crackdowns in late 1960s Brazil led to the exile of Brazilian artists and musicians, including the experimental cinema marginal director Júlio Bressane, whose Memórias de um Estrangulador de Loiras (Memoirs of a Strangler of Blondes) was shot in London in 1971. This article addresses how this little-known and barely released film, influenced by an all-night screening of strangler-themed films at London’s Electric Cinema, presents an investigation and systemization of genre tropes with regard to its director’s contemplation of, in his own words, ‘the cliché’s inappropriate and imperfect nomadism’ and ‘the pathos of experiment’. It also considers Bressane’s film in relation to exile, genre, the iconography of the blonde in Hollywood and Hollywood-adjacent cinema and in the context of British experimental and genre cinema of the period, together with its position in Bressane’s own self-referential and ongoing filmography.

This article is an autoethnography about the 2019 Latin American film tour of Eternos Indocumentados: Central American Refugees in the United States (English translation, Cárcamo 2018), a documentary about the forced migration and incarceration of asylum seekers from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala in the United States. Inspired by cine imperfecto (‘imperfect cinema’), a Latin American theoretical approach to filmmaking started in the 1960s defined by revolutionary Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa, the author/filmmaker argues that this documentary was a conscious attempt as a researcher to document the everyday stories and struggles of Central American refugees in a complex historical, transnational and geopolitical context. Written as an autoethnography, the author/filmmaker reflects on the critical dialogues that emerged from each film screening during its premiere tour across Latin America, including México, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Cuba. The author/filmmaker also briefly discusses the production of the film leading up to the tour, which began in July 2014 when mainstream media was flooded with images of what they termed ‘unaccompanied Central American children’.

Review of: The Cinema of Cecilia Bartolomé: Feminism and Francoism, Sally Faulkner (2024)

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 264 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-52616-971-6, h/bk, GBP 85.00

Review of: Transnational Memories and Post-Dictatorship Cinema: Brazil, Chile and Argentina, Tatiana Signorelli Heise (2024)

Cham: Springer International Publishing, 218 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-03147-069-1, e-book, USD 99.00