The innovative collection of essays by a distinguished group of scholars brought together in The Brazilian Road Movie - Journeys of (Self) Discovery represents the first book-length publication on Brazil's encounters with and reworkings of one of cinema's most enduringly popular genres.

The Brazilian Road Movie: Journeys of (Self)Discovery explores some of the key trends and films in the development of the road movie in Brazil. Through a collection of essays by distinguished scholars, and covering a broad range of case studies, this text spans Brazilian film production from the silent era to the present day. This text examines issues such as the reworking of the genre in a Brazilian context, the relationship between documentary and fiction, between history, politics and cinema, gender and race, the wilderness and the urban space, the national and the transnational. The essays consider among other things how the experience of the journey helped develop and was instrumental in defining identities on screen. Adopting a variety of approaches, the volume considers the significance of the iconography of the road, the experience of movement and of life on the move for the representation of Brazil on screen.

Best known to international audiences for its carnivalesque irreverence and recent gangster blockbusters, Brazilian cinema is gaining prominence with critics, at global film festivals and on DVD shelves. This volume seeks to introduce newcomers to Brazilian cinema and to offer valuable insights to those already well versed in the topic. It brings into sharp focus some of the most important movements, genres and themes from across the eras of Brazilian cinema, from cinema novo to musical chanchada, the road movie to cinema de bordas, avant-garde to pornochanchada. Delving deep beyond the surface of cinema, the volume also addresses key themes such as gender, indigenous and diasporic communities and Afro-Brazilian identity. Situating Brazilian cinema within the country's changing position in the global capitalist system, the essays consider uneven modernization, class division, dictatorship, liberation struggles and globalization alongside questions of entertainment and artistic innovation.

This volume explores the ways films made by Latin American directors and/or co-produced in Latin American countries have employed the road movie genre to address the reconfiguration of the geographical, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural landscape of Latin America.

This book offers a comprehensive and systematic overview of the flourishing genre of the contemporary Latin American road movie, of which Diarios de motocicleta and Y tu mamá también are only the best-known examples. It offers the first systematic survey of the genre and explains why the road movie is key to contemporary Latin American cinema and society. Proposing the new category of “counter-road movie,” and paying special attention to the genre’s intricate relationship to modernity, Nadia Lie charts the variety of the road movie through films by both renowned and emerging filmmakers. The Latin American (Counter-) Road Movie and Ambivalent Modernity engages with ongoing debates on transnationalism and takes the reader along a wide range of topics, from exile to undocumented migration, from tourism to internally displaced people.

Many South American films that use the popular road movie format to examine regional culture and attitudes, especially in Argentina and Brazil. Pinazza performs a careful cultural analysis of the films and investigates how road movies deal with narratives on nationhood whilst simultaneously inserting themselves in a transnational dialogue.

The chapters in this book show the important role that political documentary cinema has played in Latin America since the 1950s. Political documentary cinema in Latin America has a long history of tracing social injustice and suffering, depicting political unrest, intervening in periods of crisis and upheaval, and reflecting upon questions about ideology, cultural identity, genocide and traumatic memory. This collection bears witness to the region's film culture's diversity, discussing documentaries about workers' strikes, riots, and military coups against elected governments; crime, poverty, homelessness, prostitution, children's work, and violence against women; urban development, progress, (under)development, capitalism, and neoliberalism; exile, diaspora and border cultures; trauma and (post)memory. The chapters focus on documentaries made in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela, as well as on the work of Latino and diasporic Latin American political documentarians. The contributors to the anthology reflect the cultural and linguistic diversity of current Latin American film scholarship, with some writing in Spanish and Portuguese from Argentina and Brazil (with their original works especially translated), and others writing in English from Australia, Europe, and the USA. This book was originally published as a special issue of Social Identities.