Lost Battles. Realism, Capitalism and Childhood in Contemporary Latin America Cinema

Abstract

The place of childhood and adolescence in contemporary Latin American cinema has been established as a critical device that problematizes the geopolitical context, the accumulation of local conflicts that extend throughout the continent and whose causes reside in the fissures of the capitalist system. In this text, we will explore this territory in the cinema of Chile and Mexico through the study of films that situate childhood (updating and contradicting Buñuel’s approach in Los Olvidados more than seventy years ago) as the conflict space of a larger topic: the staging of a childhood that, although displaced from its position and subjected to the violence and intrinsic inequalities of the region, appears cinematically contained, weakening the access that the viewer has to particular contexts. As a counterpoint, the children’s sensibilities represented make it possible to intensify an internal world based on elements such as imagination, play and dreams, cinematically modulated through specific formal devices and functioning as a specific prism to approach their realities.