Showcasing the Precarious: Paraguayan Images in the Film Festival Circuit

Abstract

Building on scholarship on film festivals, more specifically on studies that focus on the links between the political economies of these events and their impact in terms of film aesthetics, on one hand, and film production, distribution, and exhibition, on the other, this chapter looks at Latin American cinema and the circulating imaginaries and assumptions about the region. The appraisal of questions related to Latin America and its images as a morphing and productive object of study stem from a circumscribed context of production. Ideas will be discussed in the light of Hamaca paraguaya (Paz Encina, 2006) and 7 cajas (Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schembori, 2012), two recent Paraguayan films that have had broad exposure and very favorable reception in the festivals’ circuit. As texts that differentially inscribe in their respective narratives’ fundamental questions about precariousness and exclusion, both films locate and update questions that are historically rooted in the study of Latin American cinema, namely those regarding a cinema of social concerns. The chapter examines these films’ thematic and stylistic traits by reading them in relation to the dynamics at stake between one particular national context (Paraguay) and the wider transnational horizons outlined by the festivals’ global network.

The original version of this chapter was revised: Word formatting elements have been removed. The erratum to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76807-6_15