Politics of realism in contemporary Venezuelan filmmaking

Abstract

Latin American Cinema has responded to the serious socio-economic problems encountered across Latin America by creating a strong tradition of socially-committed filmmaking. The principles of the New Latin American Cinema or Third Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s are not the only guiding theories of contemporary Latin American filmmaking, as many film scholars have argued, but still exert a strong influence in some current filmmaking practices. With this tradition in mind, in this seminar I will attempt to compare two current filmmaking trends in Venezuela, a particularly interesting country due to the development of a 21st century socialist program that is affecting cultural production there.