This book offers an in-depth analysis of the work of eight major female directors active from the 1970s on in Latin America. Working in four countries with vigorous film production—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico—the filmmakers’ work unsettles the canonical master narrative of the continent's film history, which assumes an all-male filmmaking chronicle. The features under study (documentary and fiction) were made by women and center on women's experiences, and lives are recounted from the female protagonist point of view. The films analyzed are thus transgressive and defiant, as they aesthetically, narratively, and technically challenge mainstream features produced in the region.
Roberts-Camps extensively analyzes the close ties between the technical and aesthetical choices the directors made and their critical approach toward sociopolitical conventions. For the author, criticism of heteronormativity, patriarchy, religion, sexism, social hierarchies, and racism are inseparable from the filmmakers’ camera work, nonlinear narrative, editing, sound landscape, and color use. These directors belong to different generations and enjoy uneven recognition in their countries and abroad. The author demonstrates that even the most popular of these filmmakers are absent or barely mentioned in either the historiography about Latin American cinema or the lists of world cinema.
The volume is organized in eight chapters, each devoted to a director's ouevre. The chapter on Argentine pioneer filmmaker Maria Luisa Bemberg highlights the director's transgressive filmmaking regarding both her aesthetics and the stories she was inclined to tell. With a taste for historical period dramas, Bemberg's strength bestowed upon her an ability to place female characters at the center of her narratives. Her female characters often aspire to liaisons and situations socially forbidden to them. Delving into the oppression that religion, patriarchy, and traditional gender roles historically brought to women, the director not only appealed to unconventional narrative, but also to untraditional ways of seeing. Bemberg fundamentally challenged the masculine gaze attributed to spectatorship. The transgression of normative sexualities leads to the isolation of characters who dare. This is the main focus of another, younger, Argentine filmmaker analyzed by Roberts-Camps, Lucía Puenzo. Puenzo places intersexuality and intergenerational issues at the center of the conflicts her characters navigate. That cluster of issues profoundly isolates the main characters of XXY (2007) and El niño pez (2009).
Female solidarity seems to be the element the author sees as informing the work of Mexican filmmaker María Novaro. Part of the first generation of women film directors in Mexico, Novaro aims to displace the male-oriented national narrative, challenging head-on established notions of mexicanidad so dear to Mexican cinema. Her characters are placed in the center of the shots to influence point of view and identification from spectators. The self-assurance of female protagonists in Lola (1989), Danzón (1991), El jardín del edén (1994), and Sin dejar huella highlights the almost absent male characters. Dana Rotberg's female characters suffer a double marginalization. They are women and they live at the borders, at the fringes of society. The Mexican director uses their bodies to explore the downturns of these women's lives. In the same vein as Bemberg, Rotberg wants to challenge mainstream notions of female bodies as spectacle. Her characters, Roberts-Camps affirms, display their bodies and their transformation to challenge an oppressive classist and patriarchal society.
Chile is represented in the volume through the work of both Carmen Luz Parot and Alicia Scherson. The only documentary Roberts-Camps analyzes, Parot's Estadio Nacional (2002), delves into the intricate ties between memory and history. Using parallel editing, the director juxtaposes original footage and contemporary survivor testimony of the Chilean soccer stadium used as a camp of extermination and torture during the Pinochet regime. Alicia Scherson's work uses surrealism to emphasize the racial, class, and gender oppression of her female character in Play (2005). The author concludes that both filmmakers use form (juxtaposition, parallelism, nonlinear narrative) to criticize the archaism of Chilean society so oppressive to women.
Brazil is included in the last two chapters of the book. Considering iconic filmmakers Suzana Amaral and Tizuka Yamasaki, Roberts-Camps executes one of the best analyses in the volume. The female characters in these directors’ films achieve self-realization through the experience of migration and regional and international displacement. Amaral's A hora da estrela (1986) or Yamasaki's Gaijin: Caminhos da liberdade (1980) emphasize the isolation these female characters suffer when confronted with new social environments and the elusiveness of happy endings in their personal stories.
The volume suffers from minor problems. The author does not address the selection criteria for including certain filmmakers and leaving others aside. A great variety of women directors has emerged in the past 15 years in the region, exploring documentary, narrative, and experimental form. A final chapter delving into the elements these directors have in common would have made a compelling case that the aesthetics and cinematic approaches of these directors are united by more than geography. Nevertheless, the book makes a relevant contribution to the scholarship on the subject, especially in the English language.
