Cinema and Politics: "border" strategies in a current Latin American trend

Abstract

A branch of Latin American cinematography born in the last two decades has shown, once again, its concern about the connection between cinematographic practices and society or reality. This article suggests that, within this heterogeneous filmography, it is possible to identify a set of films with "border" strategies. On one hand, these share ruptures and dialogs between documentaries and fictional staging, creating a "border" line that allows them to be interpreted as a new way of building reality. On the other hand, they create subjects (characters) as "non-citizens". From these perspectives, this kind of cinema exhibits the extreme everyday lives of marginal characters who have no projects, but who are projected towards political issues through a deeply critical cinema.