Global South Filmmakers in European Experimental Television

FAIN: FT-278729-21

Elizabeth Andrea Ramirez Soto, PhD
San Francisco State University (San Francisco, CA 94132-1722)

Research and writing of a book about Latin American filmmakers who worked in European public broadcasting during the 1980s and 1990s.

This project provides a history of the cultural, aesthetic, political, and institutional exchanges between European public broadcasting and filmmakers from the Global South during the 1980s and early 1990s. Specifically, it examines the work of Latin American directors who, fleeing the Southern Cone dictatorships, relocated in Europe where they continued making films under the support of various television networks. The main goal is to explore the characteristics of these collaborations studying the context in which these films emerged, how they were made, their promotion, reception, and circulation within and beyond television. While doing so, it advances an understanding of Latin American cinema as a deeply transnational one, largely produced outside the boundaries of the nation-state. Overall, this research offers a historical account of an overlooked period of rich transatlantic and pan-European cultural dialogues.