Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema

Book excerpt: In this engaging book, Maria Chiara D’Argenio delineates a turn in recent Latin American filmmaking towards inter/cultural feature films made by non-Indigenous directors. Aimed at a global audience, but played by Indigenous actors, these films tell Indigenous stories in Indigenous languages. Over the last two decades, a growing number of Latin American films have screened the Indigenous experience by combining the local and the global in a way that has proved appealing at international film festivals. Locating the films in composite webs of past and present traditions and forms, Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema examines the critical reflection offered by recent inter/cultural films and the socio-cultural impact, if any, they might have had. Through the analysis of a selection of films produced between 2006 and 2019, the book gauges the extent to which non-Indigenous directors who set out to engage critically with colonial legacies and imaginaries, as well as with contemporary Indigenous marginalization, succeed in addressing these concerns by ‘unthinking’ and ‘undoing’ Western centrism and coloniality. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines and considering the entire cinematic process – from pre-production to the films’ production, circulation and critical reception – Indigenous Plots in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema makes the case for a holistic cultural criticism to explain the cultural and political work cinema does in specific historical contexts.