From Italian Neorealism to New Latin American Cinema

This chapter examines the influence of Italian postwar neorealist films on the so-called New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) of the 1960s, and narrates a story that goes from the 1950s cinema of Fernando Birri to the 1970s films of Glauber Rocha. It suggests that the neorealist “influence” on the NLAC was mediated by an intricate, complex network of cultural and political processes that developed throughout the years between the immediate postwar period and the 1960s.