Film Quarterly columnist Manuel Betancourt discusses the disorienting experience of watching El puto inolvidable: Vida de Carlos Jáuregui ( Carlos Jáuregui: The Unforgettable Fag , 2018), Lucas Santa Ana’s documentary portrait of the Argentine gay rights activist Carlos Jáuregui . He notes how Jáuregui’s decades-old calls to action resonates with the fight for dignity for LGBTQ people chronicled in documentaries like Bixa travesty ( Tranny Fag , Kiko Goifman and Claudia Priscilla, 2018), Rainha da Lapa ( Queen of Lapa , Theodore Collatos and Carolina Monnerat, 2019), Indianara (Marcelo Barbosa and Aude Chevalier-Beaumel, 2019), and Lemebel (Joanna Reposi Garibaldi, 2019). Watching these documentaries in tandem provides an opportunity to see how different visions of radical queer politics can be incorporated into the spheres of the domestic, the activist, and the aesthetic, thus helping their subjects and audiences to imagine a brighter, more equitable future.

FQ columnist Manuel Betancourt examines how the Latin American tradition of melodrama is being reimagined by contemporary filmmakers in ways that reveal its ongoing relevance. Focusing on four recent films— Los adioses ( The Eternal Feminine , dir. Natalia Beristáin, 2017), Amores modernos ( Modern Loves , dir. Matías Meyer, 2020), La quietud ( The Quietude , dir. Pablo Trapero, 2018), and A vida invisível ( Invisible Life , dir. Karim Aïnouz, 2019)—Betancourt suggests that these recent riffs on the genre present fertile ground for narratives about how women’s agency and bodies remain tethered to patriarchal systems. Indeed, melodrama’s status as a gendered genre and association with women and their stories is central to its recuperation and reformulation in the twenty-first century as a means to reckon with national discourses about the family that may feel personal but are inherently political.

While Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is the most well-known recent example of the home-invasion thriller, Latin American cinema has produced a number of other films—many made before Bong's Oscar-winning film premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival—using similar settings to create urgent stories about economic inequality. Emerging during a period of political and economic instability, these films present the luxury home as a stand in for an antiseptic capitalist order and a dulled bourgeois complacency, providing its occupants with a sense of safety and comfort that is as arbitrary as it is illusory. These films may focus on the rift between economic classes, but they are equally driven by a desire to unravel and dismantle the systems that put the working class at the mercy of moneyed homeowners. FQ columnist Manuel Betancourt examines these trends in relation to two recent films: Mexico's Mano de obra ( Workforce , 2019, dir. David Zonana) and Argentina's Marea alta ( High Tide , 2020, dir. Verónica Chen).

The release of Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman's La Cordillera de los Sueños (Cordillera of Dreams) prompts FQ columnist Manuel Betancourt to reflect upon the reflexive turn in recent nonfiction documentaries from Latin America. Betancourt suggests that Guzmán pioneered the wave of documentary filmmakers in the region whose work marries first-person address with political urgency. Broadening his focus to include Petra Costa and Tatiana Huezo, whose films The Edge of Democracy and Tempestad explore the political collateral damage in Brazil and the violence against women in Mexico respectively, Betancourt argues that these filmmakers' embrace of self-reflexive strategies places them at the forefront of a vital nonfiction tradition that puts personal narratives front and center.

FQ columnist Manuel Betancourt chronicles an unprecedented and growing canon of narrative films from throughout Latin America that examine how twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas of modernity impact the lives and languages of the indigenous characters placed front and center in these films. While nonfiction filmmaking has a long history of documenting indigeneity on-screen, including by indigenous filmmakers, in the world of narrative features, those who are framing and directing indigenous stories are still largely outsiders. Betancourt explores these issues of language and representation with regard to three recent films: Retablo (Álvaro Delgado Aparicio, 2019), Sueño en otro idioma ( I Dream in Another Language , Ernesto Contreras, 2017) and Wiñaypacha ( Eternity , Óscar Catacora, 2018).

For his debut column, new FQ contributing editor Manuel Betancourt examines three recent Mexican films— Las niñas bien ( The Good Girls , Alejandra Márquez Abella, 2018), Esto no es Berlín ( This Is Not Berlin , Hari Sama, 2019), and Museo (Alonso Ruiz Palacios, 2018)—that trace the changing social and economic forces that fractured Mexico during the 1980s. Focusing on characters and stories that are seldom at the heart of historical chronicles, these narratives anchor revisionist approaches that lead audiences to the margins: to take women's experiences seriously, to find value in queer radical thinking, and to question colonial discourse, all the while pushing back against any kind of monolithic understanding of Mexican state discourse.

The guerrillero towers over the history of Colombian cinema for their glaring absence. Despite the country's decades-long civil war, the rank-and-file members of the armed militias that have dominated the local cultural imaginary in daily newscasts about massacres, kidnappings, and rural confrontations have been mostly absent from the canon of Colombian film. Using Alejandro Landes's 2019 film, Monos , as his case study, Manuel Betancourt offers a cursory history of the guerrilla film in the Latin American country (and the attendant conversation it's sparked within Colombia's own film critic community), arguing that a new wave of Colombian filmmakers are marrying nonfiction and novelistic techniques to finally grapple with a figure that's long been a punchline at best and a nebulous ‘Other’ at worst.

What do we talk about when we talk about Latin American cinema within the borders of the United States? Discussions of cinema from the region remain limited to the means of production: which films are produced and financed; how local filmmakers secure the money and access to make the films that then get tied to any given country's national cinema; the aesthetic and cultural movements that these films engender and replicate. But what of the distribution templates that circumscribe the kind of films and filmmakers that can make it to the United States, and under which circumstances? Looking at examples of film programming and distribution that are actively circumventing the established arthouse-release model that has become the de facto way of releasing Latin American cinema in the U.S., this article points to new efforts at defining cinemas of the region outside the bounds of an increasingly obsolete system.