Latin American Documentary

Abstract

Galvanised as a result of the founding of a film institute in Cuba in 1959, the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos or ICAIC, which fostered documentary strongly, the documentary movement began to have a significant impact in Latin America in the 1960s. One of the highlights of the 1960s was La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), by the Grupo Cine Liberación, which provided the movement with a powerful philosophy of cinema as a form of political intervention. In the 1970s the lens of the documentary movement widened to take in national dramas; Patricio Guzmán's extraordinary three-part chronicle La batalla de Chile/The Battle of Chile (1976-1979) provided a meticulous record of the tumultuous months leading up to the military coup of 1973 in which Chile's president, Salvador Allende, was overthrown. In the mid-1980s a new movement of activists took shape with groups such as Teleanálisis providing a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse about political events provided on TV. New movements such as cine piquetero in the twenty-first century continued the political thrust of Latin American documentary by portraying the plight of the disenfranchised in the modern world.

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