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Desert Highway

CEDLA Lecture | 8 December 2023 | 15.30-17.00

Frustrated journeys: the counter-road movie in Latin America

Nadia Lie, KU Leuven

The road movie is one of the most productive genres in contemporary Latin American cinema. How can we explain this popularity and which forms and functions does the genre assume in a Latin American context? This talk starts with a presentation of general features of the road movie in Latin America’s cinema of the past three decades. It then presents the underexplored yet particularly productive sub-category of the ‘counter-road movie’ (Lie 2017). Evoking images of failure or stagnation, the counter-road movie presupposes a specific use of metaphors of movement, than can be placed at the service of different causes. The lecture will illustrate this idea centering on case-studies from Cuba, Argentina, Mexico and Chile.

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