Violence in Latin American Cinema

Catalog description

This seminar explores contemporary Latin American film production in order to understand how Latin American cinema portrays and responds to violence. We explore how Latin American peoples have experienced violence historically and in modern times. Students examine how violence is perpetrated through words, images, physical harm, and exclusion. The course provides a theoretical framework, grounded in violence studies and critical discourse studies, as well as media literacy skills to analyze how films construct meaning in the wake of direct and indirect acts of violence. In films chosen from across the Americas, we focus on the ways in which invisible structures of violence can produce visible acts of violence.