New wave Latin American cinema

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT LATIN NEW WAVES

It's rare for an entire continent to experience a simultaneous cinematic new wave. But the millennium saw a new breed of film-makers transform the screen landscape across Latin America. As always, Cinema Paradiso tells you all you need to know.

Perhaps there's something apt about the fact that we should be considering Latin American cinema in the week that saw the passing of the region's most iconic maverick game-changer. Diego Maradona's sporting genius has been indelibly captured in Emir Kusturica's Maradona By Kusturica (2008) and Asif Kapadia's Diego Maradona (2019). But his pugnacious spirit is also evident in the pictures that characterised New Argentine Cinema. Indeed, the same sense of underdog struggle informed the new waves in Mexico and Brazil, as well as the emergence of pioneering talents in Chile, Colombia and Venezuela. So, who did what, where and why?

Mexploitation and More

Mexico had a long tradition of producing pictures for domestic consumption that often held their own against Hollywood imports. Among the popular genres were the wrestling sagas featuring such Lucho Libre legends as El Santo, who headlined numerous films like Rubén Galindo and Jaime Jiménez Pons's Santo vs the She-Wolves (1972). There was also a thriving market for Mexploitation, which carried over into the new century, as Cinema Paradiso users can discover by renting such combustible crime thrillers as Jorge Ramírez Suárez's Rabbit on the Moon (2004), Carlos Carrera's Backyard (2009), Iria Gómez Concheiro's The Cinema Hold Up, Everado Valerio Gout's Days of Grace (both 2011), Rafa Lara's The Battle, Diego Quiemada-Diez's The Golden Dream (both 2013) and Alejandro Andrade's Seeds (2017). Mexico also had a proud horror tradition that stretches back to the 1930s. The pick of the high-quality DVD titles available to rent are Rigoberto Castañeda KM 31 (2006) and Jorge Michel Grau's We Are What We Are (2010), which respectively centre on the traumas endured by a coma victim's sister and a family whose secret is so hideous that American Jim Mickle couldn't resist helming an English-language remake in 2013. But where else but Cinema Paradiso could you find on disc such unsettling chillers as Eduardo Rodríguez's Curandero (2005), Makinov's Come Out and Play (2012), Adrián García Bogliano's Here Comes the Devil (2012) and Evil Games (2016), Diego Cohen's Honeymoon (2015) and Emiliano Rocha Minter's We Are the Flesh (2016) ?

One of the first films to bring Mexploitation to a wider audience was Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi (1992), a $7000-budgeted bullet opera that he followed up by pairing the returning Antonio Banderas with Salma Hayek in Desperado (1995). He completed the trilogy with Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003). But Rodriguez cemented his place in Hollywood by teaming up with Quentin Tarantino on Four Rooms (1995), From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and Grindhouse (2007), to which he contributed the 'Planet Terror' segment.

One of Mexico's most successful cinematic exports, Rodriguez also scored a hit with the children's espionage romp, Spy Kids (2000), which spawned three sequels - Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams (2002), Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003) and Spy Kids: All the Time in the World (2011) - and a couple of menacing spin-offs for grown-ups starring Danny Trejo: Machete (2010) and Machete Kills (2013). The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl (2005) and Shorts (2009) were also aimed at younger audiences. But Rodriguez ventured into noirish territory in adapting Frank Miller's graphic novel, Sin City (2005), which he followed up with Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014). He remained on the dark side for the TV version of From Dusk Till Dawn (2014-16) and, most recently, he moved into sci-fi with Alita: Battle Angel (2019).

Another Mexican who found a niche in 90s Hollywood was Luis Mandoki. He memorably teamed Susan Sarandon and James Spader in White Palace (1990), Andy Garcia and Meg Ryan in When a Man Loves a Woman (1994), and Kevin Costner and Robin Wright in Message in a Bottle (1999). He also coaxed fine performances out of Jennifer Lopez and Charlize Theron in Angel Eyes and Trapped (both 2001). But he earned greater critical respect for Innocent Voices (2004), which explored the fate of child soldiers in the civil war in El Salvador. Staying with pressing social issues, Mandoki follows an aspiring Honduran singer to the United States in The Precocious and Brief Life of Sabina Rivas (2012).

Having debuted in his native Mexico, Alfonso Cuarón also tasted success in Hollywood with A Little Princess (1995) and Great Expectations (1998), which were respectively adapted from novels by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Charles Dickens. But Cuarón scored his first major hit in his native land with Y Tu Mamá También (2001) a raunchy road movie that teamed Spanish actress Maribel Verdú with rising homegrown talents, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, in earning an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. The newcomers would become familiar faces over the next two decades and they even went behind the camera, with Bernal directing himself in the cautionary tale, Déficit (2007), and Luna viewing the world through the eyes of a nine year-old boy with father issues in Abel (2010).

Nuevo Cine Mexicano

Riffing on the conventions of the ficheras sex comedy, Y Tu Mamá También proved to be a key title in the emergence of Nuevo Cine Mexicano. Equally significant was Carlos Carrera's The Crime of Father Amaro (2002), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, and Carlos Cuarón's Rudo and Cursi (2008), which was the first film produced by the Cha Cha Cha Group set up by the so-called Three Amigos - Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo Del Toro.

Since making the disconcerting chiller, Cronos (1993), Del Toro has rarely focused on Mexican topics, with both The Devil's Backbone (2001) and Pan's Labyrinth (2006) being set in Spain, despite being co-productions. He has also revelled in the technical freedom that Hollywood gives him when making comic-book adaptations like Blade 2 (2002), Hellboy (2004) and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), and such diverse projects as the creature feature Pacific Rim (2013), the gothic romance Crimson Peak (2015) and the Cold War fantasy The Shape of Water (2017), which converted four of its 13 Oscar nominations, including wins for Best Picture and Best Director.

Having earned an Oscar nomination for the devastating satire, Amores Perros (2002), Iñárritu also took the international route, as he steered Sean Penn to a Volpi Cup win at the Venice Film Festival for 21 Grams (2003) and hooked up with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett for the Golden Globe-winning Babel (2006). Then, having guided Javier Bardem to a Cannes prize and an Oscar nod for Biutiful (2010), Iñárritu took the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay for Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014). Next, he followed in the footsteps of John Ford (The Grapes of Wrath, 1940 & How Green Was My Valley, 1941) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (A Letter to Three Wives, 1949 & All About Eve, 1950) by becoming only the third person to win back-to-back Best Director Oscars for The Revenant (2015).

While Iñárritu has a clutch of Oscar firsts to his credit, his achievement is more than matched by Alfonso Cuarón, who has 11 nominations to his credit across six different categories. Like his compatriots, he accepted such varied and high-profile Hollywood assignments as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and Children of Men (2006) before becoming the first Latin director to win the Academy Award for Best Director for Gravity (2013). Indeed, he doubled up by winning the Oscar for his editing, while his direction and his cinematography were both rewarded in the case of Roma (2018), a monochrome recreation the 1970 civil unrest in Mexico City that also won the Golden Lion at Venice. His son, Jonás Cuarón, has also emerged as a solid director in his own right with Uño Año (2007) and Desierto (2015).

Among the other Mexican directors to secure international recognition during this period were Fernando Eimbcke (Duck Season, 2004 & Lake Tahoe, 2008), Gerardo Naranjo (I'm Gonna Explode, 2008 & Miss Bala, 2011), Amat Escalante (Los Bastardos, 2008; Heli, 2013; & The Untamed, 2016), Michel Franco (After Lucia, 2012 & Chronic, 2015), and Alonso Ruizpalacios (Güeros, 2014). Basing a highly individual style on neo-realism, Carlos Reygadas divided critical opinion with Japón (2002), Battle in Heaven (2005), Silent Light (2007). Post Tenebras Lux (2012) and Our Time (2018).

While this 'one-man third wave' has revelled in his role of provocateur in chief, a number of compatriots have had to be content with being one-hit wonders on the international stage. Among those on the Cinema Paradiso roster are Laura Mañá (Compassionate Sex, 2000), Carlos Sama (Without Rhyme or Reason, 2003), Francisco Vargas (El Violin, 2005), Rodrigo Plá (La Zona, 2007), Pedro González-Rubio (Alamar, 2009) and Lila Avilés, who made an excellent impression with her wittily astute debut, The Chambermaid (2018).

Neo-Novo in Brazil

Inspired by Italian neo-realism and the French nouvelle vague, film industries across Latin America experienced a series of new waves in the 1960s under the umbrella of 'Third Cinema'. This highly politicised aesthetic reached its apogee in Brazil, where the emergence of Cinema Novo enabled directors like Glauber Rocha to break with the traditions of escapist entertainment and explore the grim living conditions in the country's inner-city favela shanties and the sertão hinterland of the impoverished north east. Half a century later, Rocha's 'hunger' trilogy of Black God White Devil (1964), Entranced Earth (1967) and Antonio Das Mortes (1969) continues to exert a considerable influence on Brazilian cinema.

In 1980, after years of political repression, Héctor Babenco edged back towards this kind of socio-political cinema with Pixote (1980), an exposé of police brutality towards street children that was further explored by documentarist José Jiffily in Who Killed Pixote? (1996). By this time, Babenco had cemented his reputation in Hollywood by directing William Hurt to the Oscar for Best Actor in Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1985). He also guided Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep to nominations in his acclaimed adaptation of William Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the Great Depression, Ironweed (1987).

When Babenco returned home for Carandiru (2003), a hard-hitting account of life in Brazil's biggest and most notorious prison, he discovered that a second new wave was well under way. Contemporaries like Bruno Barreto, who had also been in Hollywood pairing Dennis Hopper and future wife Amy Irving in Acts of Love (1996) and teaming Gwyneth Paltrow and Christina Applegate as flight attendants in View From the Top (2003), were similarly rejuvenated. In Last Stop 174 (2008), Barreto recalled the life of Sandro Rosa do Nascimento, a Rio street kid who had survived the pitiless 1993 Candelária church steps massacre only to hold up a bus seven years later. Harking back to the 1950s, Barreto also traced the relationship between Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Elizabeth Bishop (Miranda Otto) and Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares (Gloria Pires) in Reaching For the Moon (2013).

By far the brightest talents among this new generation were Walter Salles and Fernando Meirelles. Having impressed with the migrant drama, Foreign Land (1995), Salles won Brazil's first ever Golden Globe with Central Station (1998), a celebration of community spirit that earned Fernanda Montenegro an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for her performance as a retired teacher who earns a living writing letters for illiterate customers at Rio's main railway station. Salles landed a second Globe nomination for Behind the Sun (2001), a blood feud saga set in the Brazilian badlands in 1910.

He shifted the scene to 1952 for The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), which stars Gael Garcia Bernal as Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. The 23 year-old future revolutionary making the trip across South America that would shape his political outlook. Such was the film's success that Salles was invited to Hollywood to star Jennifer Connelly in the 2005 remake of Hideo Nakata's Dark Water (2002). However, he returned to Brazil to team with Daniela Thomas on Linha de Passe (2008), a drama about four half-siblings in São Paulo that earned Sandra Corveloni the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her work as the boys' hard-pressed mother. But the wide, open spaces beckoned once again and Salles returned to America to adapt Jack Kerouac's classic Beat novel, On the Road (2012), with Sam Riley as New York writer Sal Paradise and Garrett Hedlund as charismatic ex-con, Dean Moriarty.

Since bursting on to the scene with a Best Director nomination at the Oscars for the unflinching flavela thriller, City of God (2002) - which spawned Paolo Morelli's sequel, City of Men (2007) - Meirelles has also spent a good deal of time in California. He received a Golden Globe nomination for The Constant Gardener (2005), a reworking of a John Le Carré novel that earned Rachel Weisz the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Subsequently, he led all-star casts through a reverential adaptation of Nobel laureate José Saramago's Blindness (2006) and 360 (2011), a revisitation of the Arthur Schnitlzer play that Max Ophüls had directed as La Ronde (1950). Moreover, since contributing to the 2014 anthology, Rio I Love You, Meirelles has also helped Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins secure Oscar nominations for playing Francis I and Benedict XVI in The Two Popes (2019).

Several other directors seized the opportunity afforded them by the new wave, including José Padilha (The Elite Squad, 2007 & Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, 2010), Sergio Machado (Lower City, 2005; The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell, 2010 & The Violin Teacher, 2015), Walter Lima, Jr. (Through the Shadows, 2015), Kleber Mendonça Filho (Neighbouring Sounds, 2012 & Aquarius, 2016), and Anna Muylaert (The Second Mother, 2015). The spotlight shining on Brazilian cinema also helped a handful of films become arthouse hits, among them César Charlone's The Pope's Toilet, Lais Bodanzky's The Ballroom (both 2008), and Juliano Dorcelles's Bacurau (2019).

However, with its extensive library of over 100,000 DVDs and Blu-rays, Cinema Paradiso is able to go way beyond any streaming service to offer users the chance to discover such lesser-known Brazilian pictures as José Henrique Fonseca's The Man of the Year (2002), Heitor Dhalla's Adrift (2009), Flavio Frederico's Boca (2010), Claudio Torres's The Man From the Future (2011), Luciano Moura's Father's Chair (2012), Hugo Prato's Elis and Gabriel Mascaro's Neon Bull (2015). Moreover, it also has a number of cult horrors tucked away in the darker corners of the catalogue, ranging from José Mojica Marins's Coffin Joe classics, Awakening of the Beast (1969) and Embodiment of Evil (2008), to recent items like Andrés de Campos Mello's Massacre Country, Rodrigo Gasparini's The Fostering (both 2015) and Samuel Galli's Our Evil (2016). As always, the choice is yours.

Nuevo Cine Argentino

In Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson, Argentina could boast one of Latin America's most innovative directors. Indeed, his neo-realist insights into daily life paved the way for such Third Cinema beacons as Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas's agit-prop epic, The Hour of the Furnaces (1966-68), which really should be available on disc in the UK. So should Luis Puenzo's The Official Story (1985), an account of life under the Junta that earned the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. However, star Norma Aleandro can be seen alongside Federico Luppi in Eduardo Mignogna's Autumn Sun (1996), while Nancy Allen headlines Alejandro Azzano's Secret of the Andes (1999).

Such titles were as typical of the pictures being exported from Argentina as Irving Cummings's Down Argentine Way (1940) and Alan Parker's Evita (1996) summed up those that had been made about the country in Hollywood. However, everything changed with Fabián Belinsky's Nine Queens (2000), an edgy heist thriller that combined suspense with social critique in introducing global audiences to Ricardo Darín, who became the face of Nuevo Cine Argentino in much the same way that Jean Gabin had been the standard bearer of French Poetic Realism in such masterpieces as Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937) and Marcel Carné's Le Quai des Brumes (1938).

Sadly, Bielinsky only managed to complete El Aura (2005) before he succumbed to a heart attack at the age of 47. However, this reunion with Darín was part of a cinematic surge that witnessed the emergence of such fine film-makers as Carlos Sorin (Historias Minimas, 2002 & Bombón El Perro, 2004), Alejandro Agresti (Valentin, 2002), Daniel Burman (Lost Embrace, 2004), Edgardo Cozarinsky (Night Watch, 2004), Tristán Bauer (Blessed By Fire, 2005) and Eliseo Subiela (Don't Look Down, 2008).

Among the other notable films to come from Argentina during this period were Santiago Otheguy's Le Leon (2006), Julia Solomonoff's The Last Summer of La Boyita and Esteban Sapir's La Antena (both 2008), with the latter being an ambitious pastiche of the silent Expressionist style that recalled the wonderfully left-field films of Canadian auteur, Guy Maddin. Check out Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary (2002) and Keyhole (2011) to see what we mean.

Another notable talent to emerge was Juan José Campanella, who first came to wider attention with Son of the Bride (2001), in which Ricardo Darín plays a forty-something restaurateur facing a midlife crisis. However, Darín would be on even better form alongside Soledad Villamil in The Secret in Their Eyes (2009), as a retired legal investigator and a judge who are drawn closer together while re-examining a 25 year-old murder case. In 2015, Billy Ray also alighted on Eduardo Sacheri's novel in casting Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nicole Kidman and Julia Roberts in the Hollywood remake, Secret in Their Eyes.

Having made Argentina the only Latin country to have won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film twice, Campanella began working regularly on such TV series as House MD (2004-11), 30 Rock (2006-13), Halt and Catch Fire (2014-16) and Colony (2016-17). He also tried his hand at animation with The Unbeatables (2013), a colourful football story that would make a fine double bill for younger viewers with Guillermo Casanova's A Trip to the Seaside (2003).

Lisandro Alonso has made his reputation with unconventional 'road movies', as he sent merchant seaman Juan Fernández to Tierra de Fuego in Liverpool (2008) and Danish army engineer Vigo Mortensen to 1880s Patagonia in Jauja (2014), which won an award at the Cannes Film Festival. The landscape has also played a crucial role in the films of Pablo Trapero, who is widely regarded as the most significant figure in New Argentine Cinema. Having demonstrated his ability to handle suspense by transferring a small-town locksmith to the Buenos Aires police force in El Bonaerense (2002), Trapero took to the highways to follow a cramped camper van on a 1000-mile trip to a wedding in Familia Rodante (2004), which bears more than a passing similarity to Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris's Little Miss Sunshine (2006).

The frozen wastes of Patagonia provide the setting for Born and Bred (2006), as interior designer Guillermo Pfening flees Buenos Aires after a tragedy and strives to rebuild his life with a menial job at a remote airstrip, This was the first of Trapero's films with his wife, Martina Gusmán, who excels in Lion's Den (2008), as a young woman who wakes in the middle of a ménage murder scene and is sentenced to a special prison for new mothers. Gusmán shares the limelight with Ricardo Darín in Carancho (2010) and White Elephant (2012), which respectively focus on the relationship between an ambulance-chasing lawyer and a dutiful doctor and a priest and a social worker seeking to care for the vulnerable in the Ciudad Oculta community that has sprung up in the ruins of an unfinished hospital.

Trapero turned his attention to the crimes of the notorious Puccio kidnapping family in The Clan (2015), while in the frustratingly unreleased The Quietude (2018), he teamed Gusmán with Buenos Aires-born actress Bérénice Bego, who is best known for such collaborations with French husband Michel Hazanavicius as The Artist (2011), for which she earned an Oscar nomination and won the César for Best Actress. Bejo also won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for Asghar Farhadi's The Past (2013) and Ricardo Darín has also collaborated with the Iranian director on Everybody Knows (2018), which co-stars Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem.

It would be fascinating to see Bejo and Darín working with Argentina's leading woman director, Lucrecia Martel. She made her name with La Ciénaga (2001), a scathing dissection of middle-class mores that features a fine performance from Mercedes Morán as a mother who doesn't seem to realise that her family is in the depths of a crisis. Morán was equally impressive in The Holy Girl (2004), as the manager of the shabby hotel where an eminent doctor makes a clumsy pass at her 16 year-old daughter, Maria Alche, who vows to save his soul. However, Maria Onetto was cast in The Headless Woman (2008), as the bourgeois who thinks she has run someone over while chatting on the phone at the wheel. But Martel changed tack completely with her next picture, Zama (2017), an adaptation of a novel by Antonio Di Benedetto that centres on the growing ennui of an 18th-century colonial functionary (Daniel Giménez Cacho), who is desperate to leave his backwater posting and return to Spain.

Lucia Puenzo made a similarly dramatic change of direction when she followed two sensitive studies of teenage sexuality - XXY (2007) and The Fish Child (2009) - with Wakolda (aka The German Doctor, 2013), a disturbing drama set in 1960 and based on Puenzo's own novel, which chronicles the burgeoning friendship between a lonely 12 year-old (Florencia Bado) and the stranger (Àlex Brendemühl) who comes to stay in the family's Patagonian hotel amidst rumours that he is none other than Nazi war criminal, Josef Mengele.

Another unlikely bond forms between a long-distance lorry driver and a new mother in Pablo Gioregelli's Las Acacias (2011), which earned its debuting director the Caméra d'or at Cannes. Having premiered in competition at the same festival, Damián Szifrón's darkly comic anthology, Wild Tales (2014), took the BAFTA and the Goya for Best Foreign Film, while also being nominated in the same category at the Academy Awards. Joaquin Cambre's charming rite of passage, Trip to the Moon (2017), may not have won many awards, but it's well worth seeing, as is Benjamín Naishtat's Rojo (2018), a gripping thriller that landed a raft of domestic prizes, including several Best Actor nods for Darío Grandinetti, who excels as a pre-Junta provincial lawyer with a secret to hide.

Only Cinema Paradiso offers you the chance to see more thrillers from Argentina, including Eduardo Pinto's Golden Gun, Gabriel Medina's The Paranoids (both 2008) and Ana Pitterbarg's Everybody Has a Plan (2012), which stars Viggo Mortensen as a doctor who swaps identities with his deceased twin. Also available on DVD is the 2014 horror triptych of Iván Noel's Children of the Night, Martin De Salvo's Darkness By Day and Pablo Fendrik's The Burning. And don't miss out on Eduardo de la Cerna, Lucas Marcheggiano and Adriana Yurcovich's acclaimed documentary, The Peddler, Nicolas Carreras's mockumentary, The Ways of Wine (both 2010), and Christoph Behl's post-apocalyptic saga, What's Left of Us (2013) - although you might want to leave the last title until the pandemic is well and truly over.

Nuevo Cine Chileno

As Chile was under the rule of Augusto Pinochet following the 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, the country's most celebrated film-makers opted for exile and freedom of expression rather than toiling under strict censorship. It's impossible to imagine a free spirit like Alejandro Jodorowsky working under any form of stricture and he made the three films that established his reputation in Mexico. Coming between the monochrome odyssey, Fando and Lis (1968), and the surreal spiritual quest, The Holy Mountain (1973), El Topo (1970) was an acid Western that so beguiled Beatle John Lennon that he bought the rights to release the film through the band's Apple company.

Since putting a psychomagical slant on Italian giallo with Santa Sangre (1989), Jodorowsky has been recounting his chequered life in the wondrously eccentric memoirs, The Dance of Reality (2013) and Endless Poetry (2016). Having been silenced for chronicling the coup in the epic three-part documentary, The Battle of Chile (1975-79), Patricio Guzmán has resumed his career with such reflective treaties on the nation's recent history as Nostalgia For the Light (2010) and The Pearl Button (2015).

Fleeing Santiago before Allende was murdered, Raoúl Ruiz relocated to France, where he managed to remain remarkably prolific and eclectic, despite often having to work on modest budgets. Having recruited John Malkovich for his Marcel Proust adaptation, Time Regained (1999), and his art biopic, Klimt (2006), Ruiz collaborated with Isabelle Huppert on The Comedy of Innocence (2000), In 2009, he came to Britain to film Gilbert Adair's novel, A Closed Book, before producing a masterly four-hour version of Camilo Castelo Branco's Mysteries of Lisbon. He had planned to remain in the Napoleonic era by starring Malkovich in Wellington (2012). But he died before shooting could commence and this beguiling, multi-character account of the Peninsula War was directed with supreme control by Ruiz's Chilean wife, Valeria Sarmiento.

Despite being born in the Chilean capital the year before the coup, Alejandro Amenábar has spent his entire life in Spain. As he holds dual citizenship, however, we shall give a passing mention to the films available from Cinema Paradiso, which include Tesis (1996), Open Your Eyes (1997), The Others (2001), Agora (2009) and Regression (2015). But we should linger a little longer over The Sea Inside (2004), as this biopic of assisted suicide campaigner Ramón Sampedro (who is impeccably played by Javier Bardem) won 14 Goyas and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

Despite Pinochet keeping the domestic industry under tight control for a quarter of a century, the seeds of a revival were sewn by FONDART, a government agency that encouraged new film-makers to find their voice. Among them was Andrès Wood, who helped launch Nuevo Cine Chileno with the semi-autobiographical Machuca (2004), which provided a teenage perspective on the events of 1973. Equally impressive was Alicia Scherson's debut, Play (2005), a tale of intertwining destinies that earned comparisons with Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire (1987).

Like Wood and Scherson, Cristián Jimenez is best known in this country for a single film, the playfully poignant treatise on literary inspiration, Bonsái (2011). But a trio of Chilean directors have firmly established their country and themselves on the world stage. Having won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film with The Maid (2009), Sebastián Silva teamed with Michael Cera for that trippy twosome, Magic Magic and Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus (both 2013). Staying Stateside, Silva directed himself as a gay performance artist hoping to persuade Brooklyn neighbour Kristen Wiig to carry his child in Nasty Baby (2015).

Just as Catalina Saavedra excelled in The Maid, so Paulina Garcia gives a career-best performance in Sebastián Lelio's Gloria (2013), as a fifty-something divorcée who hits the singles scene and starts a relationship with an eminently suitable man. But he is firmly under the thumb of his ex-wife and daughters and Julianne Moore finds herself in an identical situation with John Turturro in Lelio's American remake, Gloria Bell (2018), Romantic entanglements also inform Disobedience (2017), as Rachel Weisz returns to London from New York following the death of her rabbi father and promptly falls in love with Rachel McAdams, the wife of her strictly religious cousin, Alessandro Nivola. Howevev, it was Lelio's other 2017 film that made the headlines, as Daniela Vega thoroughly deserved the accolades she received for her performance as a grieving transgender Santiaguinas who is disowned by her recently deceased partner's family in A Fantastic Woman.

While this became the first Chilean feature to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Pablo Larraín remains the most important figure in Nuevo Cine Chileno. Following two compelling collaborations with actor Alfredo Castro on Tony Manero (2008) and Post Mortem (2010), Larrain became the first Chilean to snag an Oscar nomination for No (2012), in which Castro squared off against Gael Garcia Bernal in a biting satire on the presidential referendum that had been staged by General Pinochet in 1988.

Castro was again to the fore in The Club (2015), which examines the scandals facing the Catholic Church, while he was reunited with Bernal in Neruda (2016), which focuses on the postwar political rivalry between poet Pablo Neruda (Bernal) and President Gabriel González Videla (Castro). The corridors of power also provided the setting for Jackie (2016), which took Larrain to Hollywood for the first time to star the Oscar-nominated Natalie Portman as Jaqueline Kennedy facing the harrowing aftermath of the assassination of her husband in Dallas in 1963. Returning home, Larrain reunited with Bernal for Ema (2018), in which he plays a choreographer whose relationship with dancer Mariana Di Girolamo comes under strain when they return the boy they have adopted to the orphanage after he sets fire to their home.

Despite being a recurring presence on the UK festival scene, Colombian films only rarely secure a release on disc. However, Cinema Paradiso offers high-quality DVD and Blu-ray editions of Joshua Marston's Maria Full of Grace, which earned a Best Actress nomination at the Academy Awards for Catalina Sandino Moreno for her performance as a pregnant drug mule. Since tying for the Silver Bear in Berlin with the eventual Oscar winner, Charlize Theron for her work as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Patty Jenkins's Monster (both 2004), Moreno has worked steadily in Hollywood, notably playing Aleida March de Guevara in Steven Soderbergh's two-part biopic, Che (2008).

The year 2004 also saw the release of Sergio Cabrera's The Art of Losing, a state of the nation thriller by one of Colombia's most important directors that has since been followed in a similar vein by Jorge Navas's Blood and Rain (2009) and Andrés Biaz's The Hidden Face (2011). By contrast, Ciro Guerra delved into the country's past for Embrace of the Serpent (2015), a mesmerising study of Amazonian tribal custom and belief that became the first Colombian feature to be nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Guerra followed this up by moving forward three decades from the 1940s to examine the beginnings of the Colombian drug trade and how it impacted upon the Wayuu tribe in Birds of Passage (2018).

Even more potent was Alejandro Landres's Monos (2019), au unflinching study of child soldiers in Colombia's ongoing drug war that draws on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Wiliam Golding's The Lord of the Flies (both of which have been filmed, the former most notably as Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, 1979), as well as such acclaimed films as Elem Klimov's Come and See (1985) and Claire Denis's Beau Travail (1999).

Completing Cinema Paradiso's filmic tour of Latin America are a pair of outstanding and quirkily contrasting pictures from Uruguay, Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll's Whisky (2004) and Federico Veiroj's A Useful Life (2010). And we shouldn't overlook Venezuelan director Jonathan Jakubowicz's markedly different outings, Secuestro Express (2005) and Resistance (2020), which respectively chronicle a Caracas kidnapping and mime Marcel Marceau's efforts to smuggle some Jewish Boy Scouts across the Swiss border during the Second World War. Nor should we overlook the role played by Venezuelan film-makers in the post-millennial rise of LGBTQ+ cinema in Central and South America.

New Maricón Cinema

The combination of Catholicism and right-wing politics meant that LGBTQ+ rights had long been restricted in Latin America. As in Hollywood and elsewhere, however, gay characters and attitudes had been slipped into films with varying degrees of subtlety. Camp best friends were familiar in both Mexican ficheras and their Brazilian sex comedy equivalent, the pornochanchada. Even the cult of machismo was subverted, as film-makers sought to explore themes that were becoming increasingly common on the US indie scene thanks to New Queer Cinema.

The bi-bond between Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal in Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También shattered a lot of taboos and compatriot Julián Hernández broke down more barriers in earning a mainstream following for pictures like Broken Sky (2006), Raging Sun, Raging Sky (2009) and I Am Happiness on Earth (2014). Chucho E. Quintero also found an audience with the coming out comedies, Velociraptor (2014) and These Peculiar Days (2019), while Cinema Paradiso users can also discover such recent romantic dramas as Julio Hernández Cordón's I Promise You Anarchy (2015), Leopoldo Laborde's Boy Undone (2017) and Tadeo Garcia's A Place to Be (2018).

Long before the millennial new waves, Brazilian Oswaldo De Oliveira was able to depict lesbian love in the sexploitation spoof, Bare Behind Bars (1980). But titles like Malu De Martino's So Hard to Forget (2010) and Marcos Prados's Artificial Paradises (2012) have been relatively rare in Latin America, as the Maricón focus has largely fallen on gay men. Having scored an arthouse success with the revenge drama, The Three Marias (2002), for example, Aluisio Abranches courted controversy with From Beginning to End (2009), which centred on an affair between two half-brothers.

Several Latin American directors specialise in gay pictures, with Mauro Carvalho building a following with Boys in Brazil (2014), About Us (2017) and Cousins (2019), and Daniel Nolasco switching between documentary and fiction with Mr Leather (2019) and Dry Wind (2020). Among the other recent Brazilian gay movies available on crystal-clear DVD from Cinema Paradiso are Hilton Lacerda's Tattoo (2013), Daniel Ribeiro's The Way He Looks (2014), Marcelo Caetano's Body Electric (2016), René Guerra's Guigo Offline (2017), Filip Matzembacher's Hard Paint and Alexandre Moratto's Socrates (both 2018), with the latter having earned some good reviews during lockdown for its tale of a 15 year-old having to fend for himself in São Paulo after his mother dies.

Acceptance is less an issue than debt for Ana Brun and Margarita Irun, whose 30-year relationship is interrupted when the latter is jailed for fraud in Marcelo Martinessi's The Heiresses (2018), a beautifully made melodrama from Paraguay. Let's hope that either Peccadillo or TLA gets round to releasing Alvaro Delgado Aparicio's Retablo (2017) and Rodrigo Bellott's I Miss You (2019), which are respectively rare examples of gay cinema from Peru and Bolivia.

By contrast, there has been no shortage of same-sex stories from Argentina since Diego Lerman headed for the coast with some lesbian punks and a kidnapped lingerie clerk in Suddenly (2002), which is one of a number of Latin LGBTQ+ films to use monochrome to give the action a sense of authenticity and innocence. Equally important were Anahi Berneri's A Year Without Love (2005), a study of fetishism that won the prestigious Teddy Bear prize at the Berlin Film Festival, and Alexis Dos Santos's Glue (2006), a bisexual love story that introduced audiences to both Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, who went on to star in Robin Campillo's powerful 2017 AIDS drama, 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute), and Inés Efron, who excelled as the intersex 15 year-old in the aforementioned Lucia Puenzo's XXY and as the poor little rich girl who romances the family maid in the The Fish Child.

Cinema Paradiso has an unrivalled selection of Argentinian gay movies, so why not take a look at José Campusano's Twisted Romance (2008), Enrico Buchichio's Leo's Room (2009), Rodrigo Guerrero's The Third One (2014), Santiago Giralt's Jess and James, Martin Farina's Fulboy (both 2015), Eduardo Castro's La Noche, Lucas Santa Ana's Bromance (both 2016), Martin Deus's My Best Friend (2018) and José Celestino Campusano's Men of Hard Skin (2019) ? Or why not try Lucio Castro's End of the Century (2019), as the 20-year gap between Juan Barberini and Ramon Pujol's sensual encounters evokes memories of Alain Resnai's nouvelle vague classic, Last Year At Marienbad (1961).

And you can't go wrong with Argentina's most prolific gay film-maker, Marco Berger. Since making an immediate impact with his bisexual romcom, Plan B (2009), Berger has been coaxing audiences into rethinking their attitudes towards LGBTQ+ issues. He boldly tackled a teenager's crush on his swimming teacher in Absent (2011) before sharing the credit with Marcelo Monaco for the six short stories on show in Sexual Tension: Volatile (2012) and the lesbian romance, Sexual Tension: Violetas (2013). In Hawaii (2013), Berger charted the developing bromance between childhood friends renovating a country cottage, while the summer has the same effect on best mates holidaying without their girlfriends in the Buenos Aires suburbs in Taekwondo (2015).

The same year saw Berger focus on straight characters in Mariposa. But there was a typically transgressive element to the story, as foundling Ailin Salas finds herself falling in love with her adoptive brother, Javier De Pietro. Moreover, Berger raised the sexual temperature in showing how Gaston Ré goes about seducing his womanising roommate in The Blonde One (2019). In Young Hunter (2020, however, he ventured into more sinister territory by exploring underage sex and the dangers of the dark web.

And there you have it! Everything you'll need to know about new wave Latin American Cinema! We hope enjoyed.