South of Hollywood.

AuthorBrodsky, Roberto
PositionFILM - South American movies

A new Latin American revolution--of sounds and sights instead of proclamations and rifles, of images not words--has exploded onto the international cultural scene. At least, that's the impression left by the recent 82nd Academy Awards ceremony, where the Argentine film El secreto de sus ojos [The Secret in their Eyes] directed by Juan José Campanella won for Best Foreign Film, and Peruvian La teta asustada [The Milk of Sorrow] by Claudia Llosa was among the top five nominees for the same award. It's not every year that two Latin American movies make it on to the list of Oscar finalists, and the good news seemed to confirm both the artistic quality of the films and their strategy of producing in partnership with other countries with the clear goal of making it big in the international market.

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Of course, these films have travelled a road already paved and defined by other very clear mile markers. The first decade of the century has been a good one for Latin American cultural expression in film, starting with the Mexican hit Amores perros by Gonzalez-Iñarritu in 2000, the first film to make people take notice that something interesting was happening on movie screens south of Hollywood. Brazilian films City of God (Mereilles, 2002) and Motorcycle Diaries (Salles, 2004); Mexican blockbusters Y tu mamá también (Cuarón, 2001) and Pan's Labyrinth (Del Toro, 2006); Argentine movies La ciénaga (Martell, 2001) and Nine Queens (Bielinsky, 2000); and Chilean Machuca (Wood, 2004) and La nana (Silva, 2009) are just some of the many links in a chain that has pulled Latin American film out of the crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s.

"This movie is a bridge between cultures," said Peruvian director Claudia Llosa, just 33 years old, when she received her Golden Bear Award for The Milk of Sorrow at the 2009 Berlinale in February. The same could be said of any of the recent Latin American films because they all build bridges of some kind: between the marginal and the mainstream; between forgetting and remembering; between various cities within a city; between a tragic past and an uncertain present; and between maximalist and realist film. These films don't let your eyes wander; but they do have the ability to make you look beyond what is happening in front of your nose.

The Milk of Sorrow is a case in point. Fausta, the main character, is the daughter of a woman who was raped when she was pregnant during the war that was devastating the...

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