Esteticas hispanicas globales writing (original) (raw)
This chapter will consider the new funding landscapes for Latin American filmmakers with a focus on European funding bodies and will ask whether these have created new forms of dependence or new partnerships. European social funding bodies aligned with film festivals, have been instrumental through their support in developing the careers of some of the most high profile auteurist contemporary Latin American filmmakers. Latin American directors have been favoured by the Dutch Hubert Bals Fund, the German World Cinema Fund, and Cinéfondation a programme linked to the Cannes film festival. This chapter will outline key debates relating to the political and social implications of this new funding landscape. It will examine the arguments of those who are critical and those who are supportive of these developments and drawing on examples of films from the above-mentioned directors will ask whether relationships between funding bodies and filmmakers create new forms of dependence or new partnerships. In addition, the chapter identifies categories of films that are funded (slow or poetic cinema, popular art cinema and social realist/ cinema), and examines the cinematic languages of these categories. _____________________________________________________________________ Any attentive Latin America film aficionada/o watching the latest breakthrough 'festival film' in his/her local art cinema, whether that be in Buenos Aires, New York, Sydney, Paris or Portsmouth, will spot a recurrent pattern when reading the opening credits. They will see that the celebrated Argentine, Mexican, Brazilian, Chilean, Colombian, or Peruvian film that has done the near impossible by securing a cinema release in selected theatres in the nearest urban center, features an array of transnational public and private production funds. These co-produced films are likely to have received support from a range of funding bodies in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and perhaps Norway, or a combination of these, with some state funds from the filmmaker's own country. 1 Nonetheless, many in the audience will remain happily untouched by this production landscape and will be satisfied with having seen an interesting Latin American film convinced by its specific national 'authenticity'. Likewise, many students dutifully watching films on their world cinema or Latin American cinema modules may take the key texts selected by their tutors as national cultural artifacts, without engaging with the transnational production and distribution mechanisms (depending, of course, on how this is framed in the module). And, why would this be any different? The opening and closing credits are not the most interesting part of a film; in fact, most people start to pay attention once they finish, and leave when they signal that the main narrative has just ended. Nonetheless, there is another largely untold story hiding in the credits, and the inextricable relationship between film text and production context does, in fact, raise many interesting questions, some of which this chapter seeks to explore.