Latin American Documentary Language in the New Century: Impact and Perspectives

Documentary language constitutes a cinematographic tradition of great continuity in Latin America, one whose development has run parallel to the production of fictions, and over the last few decades, thanks to the digital revolution, has often improved upon it. The reasons for this productivity are wellknown: the proliferation of social movements that saw in the documentary an effective instrument for communicating and promoting debates related to social and political struggle; the preference for realist aesthetics more in tune with a cinema of political commitment; the creation of film schools throughout the region, particularly over the last two decades; the development of the educational and community television in countries with progressive democratic governments, which saw in this production an important instrument for social transformation, and in general the creation of alternative exhibition spaces (see Julianne Burton, 1990; Antonio Traverso & Tomas CrowderTaraborrelli, 2013). The relevance of this production can also be seen in the ongoing creation of festivals dedicated exclusively to documentary in the Latin American context such as DOCSDF (Mexico), FIDBA (Argentina), FIDOCS (Chile), CARACAS DOC (Venezuela), and others, and the broadening of the space dedicated to documentary in the region’s international festivals such as the traditional Festival of the New Latin American Cinema (Havana, Cuba), and the Festival of Guadalajara (Mexico), or in BAFICI (Argentina). There is, nevertheless, a growing imbalance between a proliferating documentary production, and the critical reflection dedicated to the documentary in Latin America. This imbalance becomes even more acute when we revise the processes of circulation and archive in the continent and the possibilities of public access to that production. Today a generalized conscience exists, among both the producers and critics and educators, with regard to this marked disproportion. The significance and the strength of the socalled Latin American Cinema, which gave special importance to documentary, marked critical reflection in the three decades with which this movement is associated (1960 to 1980), and had an enormous influence on later production, both documentary and critical, in all its aspects: historical, aesthetic and thematic (See Octavio Getino, 2002; Viviana Rangil, 2007; Gonzalo Aguilar, 2008).