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 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.

Though often seen as one of America's native cinematic genres, the road movie has lent itself to diverse international contexts and inspired a host of filmmakers. As analyzed in this study, from its most familiar origins in Hollywood the road movie has become a global film practice, whether as a vehicle for exploring the relationship between various national contexts and American cinema, as a means of narrating different national and continental histories, or as a form of individual filmmaking expression. Beginning with key films from Depression-era Hollywood and the New Hollywood of the late 1960s and then considering its wider effect on world cinemas, this volume maps the development and adaptability of an enduring genre, studying iconic films along the way.

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.

Politics of Children in Latin American Cinema explores the trend of portraying children and adolescents in a subjective, adult-constructed point of view in Latin American cinema. This trend, in which the filmmakers are able to express their own anxieties while subordinating the child’s, draws new political implications to these constructions of children’s subjective character. Chapters in this volume touch on intersectional historic contexts, such as the Brazilian judicial system, Mexico’s youth protest, Venezuelan social crisis, the Southern Cone’s post-dictatorships, and race and gender issues in Peru, Ecuador, and Argentina to elucidate these implications and how they affect child agency. Contributors to this book argue for children’s increased agency in film and in society as they analyze films in which children have more active roles. These films mirror the shift toward filmmaking that emphasizes innovative narratives and aesthetic techniques that allow children to be portrayed as social commentators, rather than passive figures. Scholars of Latin American studies, film studies, history, sociology, race studies, and gender studies will find this book particularly useful.

Through a textual analysis of six filmmakers (Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Fernando Meirelles, Walter Salles and Juan José Campanella), this book brings a new perspective to the films of Latin America's transnational auteurs.