Latin American cinema presents a rich body of work offering representations of and resistance to colonialism and neocolonialism. This includes films that take colonialism and neocolonialism as their subject matter, as well as those that incorporate into their formal language technical features that respond to the colonial context of filmmaking in the Americas or to theoretical debates around Latin American cinema and anti- and decolonial struggles.

The region has been the site of energetic debates and insightful manifestos analysing film in colonial contexts, from the theories and cinematic experiments of the Ukamau group and the manifestos and films of Solanas and Getino (“Towards a Third Cinema”) to the work of Glauber Rocha. More recently, indigenous, black and queer filmmakers have addressed questions of identity, production and reception against a backdrop of continued discrimination and violence. There has been a surge in indigenous filmmaking across Latin America, encompassing documentaries, genre film and ambitious feature films, of which Jayro Bustamante’s Ixcanul (Guatemala) and Óscar Catacora’s Wiñaypacha (Peru) offer important examples.

In Brazil, the collective Filmes de Plástico has produced fiction reflecting on blackness, memory and the afterlives of colonialism, while Affonso Uchoa’s Araby and Marcelo Caetano’s Corpo Elétrico address precarity and class consciousness. The neo-colonial violence and cultural erasure foregrounded in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s films, as well as works such as Felipe Gálvez’s Los Colonos and Lucrecia Martel’s Nuestra Tierra, offer further scope for analysis.

This special subject invites students to explore a variety of Latin American films and theory, positioning cinema as both a space where colonial violence can be documented and a site of resistance, in which histories, identities and futures can be renegotiated. Comparative approaches might also bring Latin American films into dialogue with Gillo Pontecorvo, Werner Herzog, Mati Diop and others who have addressed colonialism and its legacies.