Pathbreakers of Peruvian Fiction Cinema

Barrow, Sarah ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8221-0885 (2024) Pathbreakers of Peruvian Fiction Cinema. In: Female Agency in Films Made by Latin American Women. Global Cinema . Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-031-72599-9 (In Press)

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Abstract

Peruvian cinema has achieved unprecedented prominence in recent years amongst scholars, critics and spectators, winning accolades at the most prestigious global events. And yet the contribution to this success by women over decades remains largely unacknowledged by critics, academics and festival curators. It has been argued that this may be because they have tended to work as part of collectives rather than taking centre stage as auteur-like writer-producer-directors and have thus been “invisibilised” by film historians (Isabel Segui, 2021). However, in more recent times, several Peruvian women have emerged as directors of celebrated films that have mobilised complex female protagonists to drive their stories. This essay examines the work of two of the most prominent of these filmmakers, Claudia Llosa and Melina León, from the perspective of their female gaze and in the context of the rise of more diverse female-led fiction work from Peru. Globally renowned Llosa has crafted a body of work that takes on female-focused themes such as coming of age (Madeinusa, 2005), sexual violence (La Teta Asustada, 2008), and motherhood (Aloft, 2014 and Fever Dream, 2021), in the context of contamination, failure and abandonment. Meanwhile León followed up a series of female-focused short films with a multi-award-winning debut feature that was the first by a Peruvian woman director to be selected for Cannes Film Festival. Canción Sin Nombre (2019) tells the story of the desperate search by Georgina, a young woman from the Andes, for her newborn daughter who was stolen from her at a fake health clinic. Through analysing the presentation, by women, of female trauma and desire in these films, this essay thus seeks to show how the women protagonists are inscribed on our screens as subjects with agency. It also alludes to the right of women, as filmmakers, to adopt the active gaze that has traditionally been associated with males and explores the extent to which their works open up, as feminist film historian Barbara Koenig Quart foresaw, “literally new worlds on screen, women’s worlds, to which probably only a woman could provide entry in depth” (1989).

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	sdg 5 - gender equality,sdg 16 - peace, justice and strong institutions ,/dk/atira/pure/sustainabledevelopmentgoals/gender_equality
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Media, Language and Communication Studies
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Area Studies Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Women of Influence - Community Participation in Peru Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Film, Television and Media
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	10 Oct 2024 08:30
Last Modified:	13 Oct 2024 23:40
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/96973
DOI:

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