Latin American societies have experienced, each in their own way, different cycles in implementing and enforcing human rights policies. However, these rights have often been strongly violated. Recently, social and activist movements have been aided by the increasing use of film, video and digital media as a means of campaigning for social justice and protection of vulnerable citizens. In addition, a growing number of human rights film festivals have been established to showcase works that depict human rights violations and those produced through activism. This edited volume explores how contemporary Latin American cinema has dealt with and represented issues of human rights. Although much has been published on human rights issues in the region per se, works focusing on how cinema has engaged with the theme are not readily available.
Indeed, much of the discourses surrounding human rights are based on conventional, often monolithic, narratives. Smaller-scale, but no less important issues have been overlooked or left out of these mainstream accounts. In this sense, Human Rights, Social Movements and Activism in Contemporary Latin American Cinema shares Ekaterina Balabanova’s (2014) argument for a deconstruction of monolithic ways of thinking about the media (including cinema) and human rights, thus incorporating the spectrum of political arguments and worldviews that underpin both. Hence, this volume does not seek to provide a revisionist nor a comprehensive development of film history in Latin American with regard to human rights. The chapters herein will contribute to that discussion by looking at several collective and individual issues, which, put together, demonstrate the need to broaden the voices, experiences and perspectives on human rights.
Along these lines, Human Rights, Social Movements and Activism in Contemporary Latin American Cinema reflects on the extent to which films can play an active role in denouncing human rights abuses and exposing the struggle for visibility of different social movements and minorities . This collection explores Latin American cinema’s representations of human rights violators and oppressed subjects and groups. In so doing, it aims to assess the long overdue relation between cinema and human rights in the region, thus opening new avenues to understanding cinema’s role in social transformation . In effect, the chapters relate to at least one of these three main themes: human rights, social movements and activism. They seek to demonstrate the various ways they have been depicted in contemporary Latin American films, especially in the twenty-first century. Together, the chapters reinforce the importance of examining the ways in which contemporary Latin American cinema has explored human rights issues, while offering new perspectives to the study of (trans)national and world cinemas. Moreover, they explore the main themes and concepts covered in the volume in order to reveal the different aesthetic, political, social and historical representations of human rights in cinema.
Though sparse, we have seen the publication of a small number of books that examine the relationship between cinema and human rights in recent years. For instance, Juan Antonio Gómez García’s (2017) monograph emphasizes the need for a reflection on human rights in cinema. His study focuses on Spanish and Ibero-American films from a transnational perspective on the connection between human rights and cinema. García adopts a revisionist approach that goes back to early Spanish cinema and explores films throughout the decades of the twentieth to the current century. Another example is Mette Hjort and Eva Jrholt’s (2019) forthcoming collection, which proposes to analyse the social role of the moving image in African cinema , arguing that this approach contributes to advancing the causes of justice and fairness. According to the authors, cinema can achieve these goals through documenting, legitimizing and promoting human rights. As it happens, our collection shares the authors’ view which indicates that the scope of human rights discourses needs expanding. This expansion would be consonant with an ever-changing contemporary context, where new challenges to global society appear and are reflected in filmmaking practices.
The rise of new filmmaking practices has also seen the expansion of distribution outlets, which are crucial in the dissemination of human rights narratives. In this case, film festivals have strongly contributed to the circulation of films that would not otherwise be available via mainstream means. Festivals are, however, still limited to a narrow and specialist audience. For Mariagiulia Grassilli (2012, 31), “Human rights film festivals recognize films as powerful tools for advocacy”, as we shall discuss later in this Introduction. Besides film festivals , digital platforms have also become key to such dissemination as well as production and activism. For instance, several black, feminist and queer artists nowadays use digital resources to disseminate their work, which would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. In this sense, Dina Iordanova claims that platforms like YouTube change “the whole game of cinematic circulation by marking content available outside territorial and temporal limitations and by providing a forum for global discussion” (2012, 20). Moreover, this has been facilitated by filmmakers’ and other artists’ ways to fund their own work. Whereas previously Latin American filmmakers depended mostly on the State to fund work through highly competitive schemes in which there is a tendency to privilege more established filmmakers—besides going through lengthy processes of reviews and conditions—recently, there has been an alternative to that through affirmative action, such as crowdfunding . Iordanova argues that crowdfunding for independent low-budget features and documentaries “seems to have become the feature of the day, with filmmakers not only raising production funds through a variety of sources, but also selling their films directly from websites or making them available for streaming through dedicated outlets” (2012, 19).
Perhaps this whole new context also reflects a changing definition of human rights cinema. The chapters in this volume share the broad and encompassing view proposed by the Human Rights Film Network (HRFN) , for which human rights films “can be documentary, fiction, experimental or animation. They can be short, medium or feature length; […] can be experimental through the use of ‘new media ’ or any other artistic and technological visual means […] may be harshly realistic, or highly utopian” (HRFN 2004, qtd. in Grassilli 2012, 36). However, it is also important to consider that, often due to the challenging production conditions under which human rights and activist films are made, their technical quality is often thought of as poor in relation to the mainstream industry’s expected standard. This may even prevent some stories from being told or distributed in major exhibition outlets. HRFN , though, takes these conditions as a constitutive part of these films.
The chapters herein focus on films produced mostly after 2000, considered a moment of consolidation of a new fertile era of cinematic production after the many dictatorships across Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, although some national cinemas started rebuilding their cinematic production in the 1990s, as the examples of the retomada in Brazil and the nuevo cine argentino indicate, 1 we would argue that it is actually in the new millennium that the production expanded and diversified. In fact, the 1990s was a decade that witnessed the slow recovery of cinematic production, thus marked by challenges such as the low number of films produced and drastic changes in the financing model that transformed the relationship between State funding and filmmaking, which led to new avenues being sought, including international co-production and funding.
Evidently, the various countries of the continent, with their specific histories, underwent different experiences in their cultural contexts. Whereas some cinemas started gaining momentum, others were still suffering and the film production was scarce. For example, John King argues that film production in Mexico , one of the most prolific cinemas in Latin America together with Brazil and Argentina, dropped significantly between 1995 and 1997, constituting “the lowest figures since the inception of sound cinema in the early 1930s” (2000, 263). Moreover, cinema in the 1990s was also arguably moving away from discourses that are related to human rights abuses. In this sense, King argues that there was a kind of process of amnesia brought by the State into society during Carlos Menem’s government in Argentina whereby forgetting the abuses of the State assisted the so-called “reconciliation” process. King affirms that Argentine cinema showed a similar trend and “seemed to share this process of forgetting” (2000, 265). Other countries that were experiencing re-democratization did not have the infrastructure in place to develop their film production, such as Paraguay. In fact, apart from the “big three”, to this day many Latin American countries still struggle to maintain a strong cinema production. This could explain the disengagement from certain themes related to human rights and State violence. Although already present in some films of the 1990s, it is in the new millennium that these issues became more evident in Latin American cinema. 2
Looking at the prolific and diverse production of films in Latin America since 2000, and through diverse interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches, the chapters discuss the th...