Audio-Visual Memory

Latin America and Cinema Organisers

27th International Bremen Film Conference – 10 to 13 May 2023

The Latin American continent is renowned for its use of film and its cinema – a cinema marked both by its international influences (Europe, Hollywood) and by its own distinctive innovations and deliberate departures from other filmmaking traditions. Concepts such as Tropicália, Cinema Nôvo, Third Cinema and Magic Realism attempt to capture the diversity and distinctiveness of this cinema, an important part of which is to grapple with themes such as the social reality of Latin American countries, post-colonial experience, the diversity of the Americas and the region’s sometimes traumatic recent history, including the military dictatorships of the twentieth century. This latter strand of the region’s cinema will be of particular relevance to the international film conference, given that it is being held in the fiftieth year since the bloody putsch in Chile. Another key focus will be the links between Latin American cinema and the cinema of the Global South.

The history of cinema in Latin America stretches all the way back to the earliest days of film, when silent films were not just watched by Latin American audiences but also made by pioneering Latin American filmmakers. In towns without their own picture house, travelling cinemas brought movies to people by bus or train. Films became a window on the world, and in the second half of the twentieth century increasingly also came to be an arena for political and social debate. Latin American filmmakers brought the poverty, inequality and underdevelopment of Latin American countries to the screen, and cinema became a site of revolution, influenced especially by the Cuban Revolution of 1956 and the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). Established film industries endured, but were often treated with hostility by the films and manifestoes of New Latin American Cinema.