European Co-production Funds and Latin American Cinema: Processes of Othering and Bourgeois Cinephilia in Claudia Llosa's La teta asustada

Abstract

Latin American women's filmmaking has an unprecedented international profile thanks to the films of the Peruvian director Claudia Llosa, and the Argentine directors Lucía Puenzo and Lucrecia Martel. What is frequently unacknowledged when discussing the work of these award-winning filmmakers is the fact that all of their films are co-productions with Europe, and that programmes such as Cinéfondation, a programme aligned with the Cannes film festival, the Hubert Bals Fund, the World Cinema Fund and Ibermedia have been instrumental in their production. This article will tell this story through a discussion of the work of Claudia Llosa with an introduction to the issues raised by her award winning festival film Madeinusa (2006), and a focus on La teta asustada/ The Milk of Sorrow (2009). It will consider the arguments of theorists who critique what they see as neo-colonial European interventions in 'world cinema', and those who celebrate the enabling work of the funding bodies. The chapter asks where can we place the cultural production of Llosa within these paradigms? Does the film confirm the critical positions by being subject to a process of othering for a European cinephile festival audience? Does it create its protagonist Fausta, an Andean migrant to Lima, from racist, neo-colonial stereotypes as some critics claim? Or, does it raise important questions relating to class and ethnic divisions within contemporary Peruvian society? The article ends with a discussion of how Llosa's second film, that presents the urban poor and the colonial class from a bourgeois point of view, compares with the films of Lucrecia Martel and Lucía Puenzo which provide a bourgeois point of view on the bourgeoisie itself.

De desadaptaciones y reiteradas violencias : la distancia entre la película Magallanes y la novela La pasajera

“…Paso entonces a preguntarme ¿desde qué lugar de enunciación aspira esta película a interpretar el pasado de la guerra interna y el actual Perú neoliberal posconflico? En primer lugar, hay que tomar en cuenta que Magallanes es una coproducción internacional con un nivel de actuación y de calidad de producción bastante alto que la hacen representativa del perfil que tiene el cine contemporáneo como pieza fundamental de la producción cultural en tiempos neoliberales: junto a su denuncia política en cuanto a contenido, sus mecanismos de producción y circulación confirman su pertenencia a un tipo de world cinema estrechamente ligado al gusto del mercado de los festivales internacionales (Shaw, 2016). En esta línea, y desde el modelo genérico del relato de serie negra, o thriller, Magallanes examina un asunto de relevancia política nacional que, sin embargo, posee legibilidad universal 9 .…”