Focusing on films from Chile since 2000 and bringing together scholars from South and North America, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World is the first English-language book since the 1970s to explore this small, yet significant, Latin American cinema. The volume questions the concept of "national cinemas" by examining how Chilean film dialogues with trends in genre-based, political, and art-house cinema around the world, while remaining true to local identities. Contributors place current Chilean cinema in a historical context and expand the debate concerning the artistic representation of recent political and economic transformations in contemporary Chile. Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World opens up points of comparison between Chile and the ways in which other national cinemas are negotiating their place on the world stage. The book is divided into five parts. "Mapping Theories of Chilean Cinema in the World" examines Chilean filmmakers at international film festivals, and political and affective shifts in the contemporary Chilean documentary. "On the Margins of Hollywood: Chilean Genre Flicks" explores on the emergence of Chilean horror cinema and the performance of martial arts in Chilean films. "Other Texts and Other Lands: Intermediality and Adaptation Beyond Chile(an Cinema)" covers the intermedial transfer from Chilean literature to transnational film and from music video to film. "Migrations of Gender and Genre" contrasts films depicting transgender people in Chile and beyond. "Politicized Intimacies, Transnational Affects: Debating (Post)memory and History" analyzes representations of Chile’s traumatic past in contemporary documentary and approaches mourning as a politicized act in postdictatorship cultural production. Intended for scholars, students, and researchers of film and Latin American studies, Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World evaluates an active and emergent film movement that has yet to receive sufficient attention in global cinema studies.

Ecuadorian cinema has been largely overlooked in film scholarship, usually being limited to brief descriptions in Latin American compendiums. Ecuadorian cinema for the 21st century would be the first major publication in English to fill this gap. It provides a thorough account of film activities during the new millennium, while also referring to the country’s previous film history. Specifically, this book discusses the so-called ‘mini-boom” in Ecuadorian cinema, and its relation to industry structures, film policy, and the context of Socialism for the 21st century, hence the chosen terminology of “Ecuadorian cinema for the 21st century”. What makes this project distinctive, aside from the originality of its content, is its transdisciplinary methodology. As a means to frame the textual analysis of selected films, this book discusses theories on national cinemas, memory, political ideology, and production practices, in an interdisciplinary approach that can be emulated in later projects. For this purpose, the book is divided into five chapters, in addition to a brief introduction and conclusion. Each chapter relies on specific case studies to discuss local narratives and documentaries, whether state sponsored or privately funded, centring primarily on films that premiered in commercial theatres between 2006 and 2016.

Insurgent Skin: Body, Gender, and Sexuality in Latin American Cinema argues that twenty-first century Latin American cinema about lesbian, feminist, intersex, and transgender themes is revolutionary because it disrupts heteronormative and binary representation and explores new, queer signifying modes. Grounded in feminist and queer theory, Insurgent Skin conjugates film phenomenology and theories of affect and embodiment to analyze a spectrum of Latin American films. The first chapters explore queer signifying in Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel’s Salta trilogy and the lesbian utopia of Albertina Carri’s Las hijas del fuego (2018). Next, the book discusses the female body as uncanny absence in Tatiana Huezo’s documentary Tempestad (2016), a film about gendered violence in Mexico. Chapter Five focuses on intersex films and the establishing of queer solidarity and an intersex gaze. The last chapter examines transgender embodiment in the Chilean film Una mujer fantástica (2017) and Brazilian documentary Bixa Travesty (2018).

This book disrupts the quintessential assumptions of ecology, the politics of identity, and environmental destruction, while proposing new readings, interpretations, and solutions in the face of urgent environmental issues.

Diamela Eltit’s literary work emerged on the Chilean cultural scene in the 1980s when the Pinochet regime (1973-1990) had consolidated its project of extermination, censorship, and neoliberal shock therapy. Forced to write in a suffocating atmosphere of restriction and violence, Eltit boldly cultivated a radical, insurrectional poetics aimed at questioning the very underpinnings of authoritarian power and discourse. While Eltit’s novels, published between 1983 and the present, provide a remarkable vision of Chile that has evolved over the past decades, she offers a different vantage point through her prolific and rigorous cultivation of literary essays. Translated for the first time into English, this collection of Eltit’s essays allows readers to delve into her key concerns as a writer and intellectual: the neoliberal marketplace; the marginalization of bodies in society; questions of gender and power; struggles for memory, truth, and justice after dictatorship; and the ever-complex relationships among politics, ethics, and aesthetics.

The first academic volume to theorize and historicize contemporary artistic practices and culture from Chile in the English language, Dismantling the Nation takes as its point of departure a radical criticism against the nation-state of Chile and its colonial, capitalist, heteronormative, and extractivist rule, proposing otherwise forms of inhabiting, creating, and relating in a more fluid, contingent, ecocritical, feminist, and caring worlds. From the case of Chile, the book expands the scholarly discussion around decolonial methodologies, attending to artistic practices and discourses from distinct and distant locations-from Arica and the Atacama Desert to Wallmapu and Tierra del Fuego, and from the Central Valley, the Pacific coast, and the Andes to territories beyond the nation's modern geographical borders. Analyzing how these practices refer to issues such as the environmental and cultural impact of extractivism, as well as memory, trauma, collectivity, and resistance towards neoliberal totality, the volume contributes to the fields of art history and visual culture, memory, ethnic, gender, and Indigenous studies, filmmaking, critical geography, and literature in Chile, Latin America, and other regions of the world, envisioning art history and visual culture from a transnational and transdisciplinary perspective.

This book analyses how contemporary genre cinema represents trans-identified characters. Informed by key debates within transfeminism, queer theory, contemporary trans studies – and engaging with the concerns voiced by gender critical feminism – this culturally oriented book critiques the representation of trans characters in a range of cinematic genres, including the musical, period costume drama, the road movie, melodrama, coming-of-age stories, and romances. The case studies address the ways in which trans identifications have been coded within the narrative and stylistic expectations of the genres. Are genre films successful in affirming trans identifications or do they reinforce trans stereotypes and anti-trans discourses? This is a timely and accessible book, which addresses Anglophonic, European and Latin American cinemas, and is ideal for students studying courses in Film Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies or Gender Studies.