Amores Perros (2000) speaks to an international audience while never oversimplifying its local culture. This study of this film opens up that culture, revealing the film's relationship to television soap operas, pop music and contemporary debates about what it means to be Mexican.

Best known of the globally acclaimed new wave of Mexican cinema.

"Amores perros is a 2000 Mexican crime drama film directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and written by Guillermo Arriaga. Amores perros is the first installment in González Iñárritu's "Trilogy of Death", succeeded by 21 Grams and Babel. It is an anthology film constructed as a triptych: it contains three distinct stories connected by a car accident in Mexico City. The stories centre on a teenager in the slums who gets involved in dogfighting; a model who seriously injures her leg; and a mysterious hitman. The stories are linked in various ways, including the presence of dogs in each of them."--

Given its features as a modern mass medium and thus closely related to the nation, cinema has rightly been regarded as a privileged site for putting forward and contesting representations of national identity, or in short, as a main arena in which narratives of national identity are negotiated. What do films such as Amores Perros or Traffic say about Mexican identity? In what way could Bread and Roses or The Crime of Padre Amaro be part of its transformation? This book looks at representations of "e;Mexicanity"e; in Mexican cinema and also in Hollywood throughout the twentieth century and beyond, arguing that the international context plays at least as important a role as ethnicity, religion and language in the construction of images of the national self, although it is seldom taken into account in theories of national identity. The Mexican film may reveal much about Mexican society, e.g.,Traffic and the prevalence of drug trafficking, Bread and Roses, and the problems of migration; Amores Perros, in relation to metaphors of the nation as an extended family; The Crime of Father Amaro, in discussing the changing position of the Catholic Church; and Herod's Law, a scathing critique to the political system that dominated Mexico for the best part of the 20th century. Throughout, the book emphasises the contingent nature of hegemonic representations, and our ongoing need to tell and to listen to - or indeed, view - stories that weave together a variety of strands to convincingly tell us who we are.

After the modern Mexican state came into being following the Revolution of 1910, hyper-masculine machismo came to be a defining characteristic of "mexicanidad," or Mexican national identity. Virile men (pelados and charros), virtuous prostitutes as mother figures, and minstrel-like gay men were held out as desired and/or abject models not only in governmental rhetoric and propaganda, but also in literature and popular culture, particularly in the cinema. Indeed, cinema provided an especially effective staging ground for the construction of a gendered and sexualized national identity. In this book, Sergio de la Mora offers the first extended analysis of how Mexican cinema has represented masculinities and sexualities and their relationship to national identity from 1950 to 2004. He focuses on three traditional genres (the revolutionary melodrama, the cabaretera [dancehall] prostitution melodrama, and the musical comedy "buddy movie") and one subgenre (the fichera brothel-cabaret comedy) of classic and contemporary cinema. By concentrating on the changing conventions of these genres, de la Mora reveals how Mexican films have both supported and subverted traditional heterosexual norms of Mexican national identity. In particular, his analyses of Mexican cinematic icons Pedro Infante and Gael García Bernal and of Arturo Ripstein's cult film El lugar sin límites illuminate cinema's role in fostering distinct figurations of masculinity, queer spectatorship, and gay male representations. De la Mora completes this exciting interdisciplinary study with an in-depth look at how the Mexican state brought about structural changes in the film industry between 1989 and 1994 through the work of the Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE), paving the way for a renaissance in the national cinema.

This book focuses on a selection of internationally known Latin American films. The chapters are organized around national categories, grounding the readings not only in the context of social and political conditions, but also in those of each national film industry. It is a very useful text for students of the region's cultural output, as well as for students of film studies who wish to learn more about the innovative and often controversial films discussed.

This volume focuses on the vibrant practices that make up Latin American cinema, a historically important regional cinema and one that is increasingly returning to popular and academic appreciation.