Event Highlights: Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century
This event celebrates the publication of Peruvian Cinema of the Twenty-First Century: Dynamic and Unstable Grounds. On Friday, March 12, the book’s editors Cynthia Vich, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Film at Fordham University, and Sarah Barrow, Professor of Film and Media at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, were joined by Ignacio Sanchez Prado, Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis. Adela Pineda, Professor of Spanish Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Boston University, moderated the conversation.
In conversation with Cynthia Vich, Sarah Barrow, and Ignacio Sanchez, was highlighted the relevance of the study of Contemporary Peruvian Cinema in a period where neoliberalism affects not just the politics but the cultural production and phenomena of the multidimensional national country. The organization of the book mirrors the production and the demand of Peruvian cinema today, as well as the process of the dialogue with the concept of neoliberalism from below and its internationalization in the margins. How can we understand cinema as part of alternative models of life? This collection is a model for other scholars and critics of how we need to begin rethinking Latin American cinema. In this case, the book celebrates a bilingual conversation between a mosaic of authors and a great body of work around Peruvian cinema trying to present Latin American cinema away from the rarified version that is presented in festivals but covering how this film industry functions and its aesthetic ambitions. It was brought to the table, the importance in this book to shed a light on the great diversity of examples that currently exist on how to explore Peruvian cinema around: popular cinema, a trend of successful popular comedies, filmmaking in the Andean region, the visual anthropology of production processes and power dynamics to articulate an artistic vision, modes of production, art film for festival circuits, memory films, touristic gaze, female and fiction projects, etc.
This is the first English-language book to provide a critical panorama of the last twenty years of Peruvian cinema. Through analysis of the nation’s diverse modes of filmmaking, it offers an insight into how global debates around cinema are played out on and off screen in a distinctive national context.
The insertion of post-conflict Peru within neoliberalism resulted in widespread commodification of all areas of life, significantly impacting cinema culture. Consequently, the principal structural concept of this collection is the interplay between film production and market forces, an interaction which makes dynamism and instability the defining features of 21st-century Peruvian cinema.