This article centres on the development of the documentary & iquest;Usted de nuevo se & ntilde;orita? (You again Miss?) which was created from the archives of Peruvian women filmmakers. The article reflects on the projects of preserving the archives of women filmmakers which began in 2018, the year in which the National Audiovisual Preservation Project Grants from the Ministry of Culture began. article shares the experience of finding the archives of Maria Barea and Paloma Valdeavellano, who were both involved in women's organization. It concludes that, although these archives have been kept in domestic spaces, this has made it possible to access memories that renew the history of Peruvian cinema.
Taking into consideration the status of archival projects related to the legacy of Colombian filmmakers Marta Rodriguez, Gabriela Samper, Gloria Triana and the feminist collective Cine Mujer, these notes aim to explain the complexities involved in the creation of digital repositories. The discussion keeps in mind not only technical needs but also the intellectual challenges that these processes convey. From collecting documents to digital publishing or exhibiting, digital repositories should encourage the rethinking of historiographies, notions of 'pioneerism' and auteurism, inviting to the unveiling and inclusion beyond the figure of the woman director.
The creation of the 'Women and Film' International Women's Film Festival in Argentina 1988 opened a crucial space for women to work in filmmaking and its associated trades. This article revisits little-known or overlooked materials documenting activities, actions and practices related to the organization of this groundbreaking event. It also offers a critical framework and a series of interpretative keys through which to develop an account of the festival. Simultaneously, the research carried out for the article gives an overview of the location, accessibility and value of the materials documenting the festival.
This Special Issue 'Guerrilla Archiving: Documents for a Feminist History of Latin American Cinemas' is a vindication of the importance of preserving women filmmakers' collections of documents. We map, systematize and render visible these 'imperfect archives' or counter archives, which are fundamental to our ambitious and collective project of rewriting the history of Latin American cinemas from a feminist perspective. This issue also offers critical and contextual frameworks for understanding archival sources related to women's filmmaking practices in cinema, video and/or television production. Our guerrilla feminist interventions provide an expansive view of women's work while assessing the current state of the archives of Latin American women filmmakers' heritage scattered worldwide.
This article reviews the archives of Central American female film pioneers. It focuses in particular, on the information available for four filmmakers: Patricia Howell and Mercedes Ramirez from Costa Rica, and Maria Jos & eacute; & Aacute;lvarez and Rossana Lacayo from Nicaragua. It suggests that what is available reflects the importance of the personal or state archives, and the spaces, gaps and losses that exist in these archives. The region's most complete records, the article notes, are dedicated to male directors and were set up by military governments to register these directors' works. Finally, this article reflects on the future of the archive given the number of films being made today.
The aim of the article is to address the work of the Bolivian film critic and cultural agent Amalia de Gallardo, between the 1960s and 1980s, introducing and analysing a corpus of her written production, scattered in different repositories: the magazine cine/rama (1966), the text book Iniciaci & oacute;n cinematogr & aacute;fica (1972) and the critic column 'Estrenos de la semana' (1979-87). The article analyses the documents of this scattered archive and the author's contribution to the shaping of the fields of exhibition, film critic and audience training during the twentieth century in Bolivia.
Franca Donda (Italy, 1933-2017) was an activist, filmmaker and photographer who lived in Caracas for the most part of the second half of the twentieth century. During these decades, she made several short films with the Venezuelan collectives Cine Urgente (Urgent Cinema, 1968-73) and Grupo Feminista Mi & eacute;rcoles (Wednesday's Feminist Group, 1979-88). Throughout her life, she also took thousands of photographs of women across Latin America. However, her work has received little scholarly attention, and her archive has not been properly preserved. This article demonstrates the importance of protecting the legacy of Donda, Cine Urgente and Grupo Feminista Mi & eacute;rcoles. To do so, it explores Donda's multifaceted identity and outlines the production of the two collectives. It maps, locates and assesses the conditions of some of the materials that could comprise their archive. And it reflects on issues of positionality and briefly describes the transmedia project that is emerging from this research.
This article delves into the work of Gabriela Bussenius (1889-1975), focusing on her 1917 feature film La agon & iacute;a de Arauco o el olvido de los muertos/Death Throes of Arauco or How to Forget the Dead. Bussenius was one of Chile's pioneering female filmmakers who explored the struggles of and solidarities between women and the Mapuche. This article challenges film history's erasure of Bussenius's contributions, offering a critical reading of the extant materials, local film history and archive stories. It argues that the production and circulation of this film created an emancipated space, where gender and other hierarchies were abolished and thus were, albeit ephemeral, vehicles of counter-hegemonic forces.
This manuscript articulates a critical and contextual framework from the feminist theory of new materialism. It introduces Josefina Vicens as a prolific screenwriter with a long and relevant career in Mexican cinema. Despite the existence of many film women writers during the Golden Age, most wrote little, and their work still needs to be discovered. But Mexican institutional archives have only fifteen of approximately one hundred Vicens's film texts, despite scripts being invaluable resources for linking creation with the material conditions that make it possible. Finally, it proposes to study movie script outside of an economy of prestige and invites its redefinition from the notions of inadequacy and waste.
The unknown archives of the Brazilian lesbian film and video maker Norma Bahia Pontes (1941-2010), including essays, photographs, documents, films and videos, are scattered across the closets and personal collections of ex-girlfriends, friends and also institutions in Brazil, France and the United States. Although fragmented, these traces-when combined with interviews-outline the filmmaker's journey, her experiences as an immigrant, the aesthetic and media influences that shaped her work, and her involvement in activism: across 1960s Cinema Novo (Brazilian New Cinema) as a film critic and filmmaker and creating a dozen documentary shorts on videotapes on lesbian issues amidst 1970s Women's Liberation Movement in New York City. Despite being a valuable audio-visual archive for feminists and queer studies, Bahia Pontes's works are fragile, incomplete and unknown. This article illuminates these archives and reflects upon her singular and neglected trajectory in audio-visual history.
The Marginal Film Cooperative was a Mexican militant collective active from 1971 to 1975. Until 1973, their work focused on the production, circulation and exhibition of Super 8 films, linked to different waves of insurgencies promoted by Mexican unions. Guadalupe Ferrer, a former member, keeps at her house their only known archive from this period. This text explores a feminist reading of the archive as a way to confront the realm of textual production on and by the Cooperative-monopolized by male voices-against the realm of the social reproduction of their work-in which women had a more prominent role.
Ventura Pons (1945–2024) was one of the most prolific and politically committed filmmakers in contemporary European cinema. Throughout a five-decade career, he directed 33 feature films that consistently and fearlessly challenged social taboos. Emerging from the independent Catalan theatre scene during the late Francoist period, Pons brought a politically charged and aesthetically distinctive voice to post-dictatorship Catalan cinema. His debut feature, Ocaña, retrat intermitent ( Ocaña, an Intermittent Portrait ) (1978), is widely recognized as a landmark in LGBTQ+ representation and a key text of the Spanish Transition. The film’s candid portrayal of queer life in 1970s Barcelona established Pons as a director unafraid to confront dominant cultural narratives. This early defiance evolved into a sustained cinematic practice that spotlighted marginalized voices – including sex workers, queer and older characters – while advancing a distinctly Catalan cultural project by adapting literary texts and plays for the screen, releasing his films in the original Catalan and casting actors with experience in Catalan theatre and television. Pons’s later works reflect his enduring interest in intergenerational dialogue, human vulnerability and countercultural creative figures, increasingly freer from formal conventions and commercial pressures. This Special Issue revisits Pons’s oeuvre from contemporary critical perspectives, situating his work within debates on affect, ageing, genre, queer representation and cultural memory. In doing so, it affirms Pons’s enduring significance not only as a Catalan auteur but as a filmmaker whose legacy challenges us to reconsider the relationship between cinema and resistance.
This article examines the role of touch and caresses in Ventura Pons’s films, focusing on their significance in intergenerational relationships, gender dynamics and sexuality. Through an analysis of several films of Ventura Pons: Carícies ( Caresses ), Food of Love and Barcelona ( un mapa ) ( Barcelona [ A Map ]), it explores how tactile interactions convey themes of affection, nostalgia and power imbalances. Drawing on feminist theories by Luce Irigaray, Sara Ahmed and Karen Barad, the article highlights the contrasting representations of feminine and masculine caresses: while feminine touches often embody maternal care or erotic openness, masculine caresses tend towards possessiveness and objectification. The films reflect societal shifts in post-Franco Spain, addressing urban alienation, familial disintegration and the liberation of repressed desires. Pons’s work reveals a tension between isolation and connection, with touch serving as a medium for both intimacy and control. The study underscores how Pons challenges social conventions, portraying intergenerational relationships as sites of complexity, where erotic and familial bonds intertwine. Ultimately, the article positions Pons’s cinema as a poignant exploration of human vulnerability, longing and the transformative power of touch.
The filmography of Catalan director Ventura Pons is both prolific and diverse, spanning several decades. Critical studies, though scarcely sufficient to honour his legacy, tend to favour one particular phase of his career: the mid-1990s. Yet his early beginnings remain equally vital. This article focuses on the period following the resounding success of his groundbreaking debut, Ocaña, retrat intermitent ( Ocaña, an Intermittent Portrait ) (), examining two films that marked his entry into fiction: El vicari d’Olot ( The Vicar of Olot ) () and its follow-up five years later, La rossa del bar ( The Blonde at the Bar ) (). These works emerged during Spain’s Transition, a historical moment when the country had recently overcome four decades of dictatorship and Catalan cinema reclaimed its former prominence alongside Madrid in the national film landscape. What distinguishes Pons, however, is his deep-rooted connection to his immediate reality. Both films contain the seeds of what would later define his refined style: narrative rhythm, explorations of sexuality and marginalized protagonists. Above all, they showcase a hallmark of his career: his commitment to Catalan literature through adaptations exclusively of Catalan works, performed by recurring actors in Catalan-language scripts, as well as his evocative use of space – particularly Barcelona and its peripheries (like the region of Olot). Though hardly known at the time, Pons portrays a city on the cusp of global reinvention, preserving a Barcelona that would soon fade into memory.
Review of: Ecuadorian Cinema for the 21st Century , María Fernanda Miño Puga (2023) London: Palgrave Macmillan, 222 pp., ISBN 978-3-03140-988-2, h/bk, GBP 89.99
Review of: Fashioning Spanish Cinema: Costume, Identity, and Stardom, Jorge Pérez (2021) Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 280 pp., ISBN 978-1-48750-911-8, h/bk, USD 79.00
Review of: The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor, Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky (2020) Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 336 pp., ISBN 978-1-47800-644-2, h/bk, USD 107.95 ISBN 978-1-47800-644-2, p/bk, USD 29.95 ISBN 978-1-47800-707-4, e-book, USD 29.95
Through the analysis of Blanco en blanco/ White on White, this article examines both the cinematographic gaze and photographic practice in relation to an oppression of the female body and the extermination of the Indigenous communities of Tierra del Fuego (1880–1910). Blanco en blanco integrates ethics and aesthetics to question the (passive) gaze of the audience and to denounce the role of the photographic practice in the violent construction of accounts about the Republic of Chile. This deconstructionist approach sets up a debate about cinematographic spectatorship, photographic montage and historical discourse as montage.
Review of: (Un)Veiling Bodies: A Trajectory of Chilean Postdictatorship Documentary, Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto (2019) Oxford: Legenda, 219 + xiv pp., ISBN 978-1-78188-701-1, h/bk, GBP 80.00 ISBN 978-1-78188-429-4, p/bk, GBP 10.99
Review of: The Cinema of Cecilia Bartolomé: Feminism and Francoism , Sally Faulkner (2024) Manchester: Manchester University Press, 264 pp., ISBN 978-1-52616-971-6, h/bk, GBP 85.00
