The Motorcycle Diaries

Front matter

THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES

Youth, Travel and Politics in Latin America

Nadia Lie

Contents

List of Figures vi Series Editors’ Introduction viii Acknowledgements x Introduction 1 1 The Transnational Filmmaking of Walter Salles 6 2 Narratives of Formation in Latin America 21 3 Rejuvenating Che 31 4 The Road Movie Revisited 49 5 Tourism 63 6 Body Politics 82 Epilogue 97 Bibliography 100

List of Figures

1.1

Introduction

The Motorcycle Diaries (Diarios de motocicleta) (Salles, 2004) is a recent classic of Latin American cinema. Ever since its release in 2004, it has enjoyed an unabashed popularity worldwide. According to Jorge Luis Borges (1952: 151), the reason why something turns into a classic is mysterious: books win and lose audiences for unexplained reasons, he said, and their status as ‘classic’ generally implies they are not read anymore, just cited. In the case of The Motorcycle Diaries, however, many have watched the film at some point in their life, and they tend to remember it. Moreover, the film continues to exert a spell on contemporary viewers even though almost two decades have passed since its first release. What is it that makes this film so appealing to so many people?

Without a doubt, travel and all that it entails (a sense of freedom, a discovery of something new) has had an important share in the film’s success. Many people decided to hit the road after watching it, not only because it ultimately seems rather easy to do so — the travel is low budget and nothing much is planned — but also because travel is presented as a truly meaningful experience. Depicting a journey of several months, the film appeals to backpackers and aligns with the current interest in gap years: being off to some faraway place to shed off the cumbersome engagements, the routine and the bureaucracy and become free again. Free to live and to love. But also, free to celebrate friendship and meet interesting new people. Travel is represented here beyond the temporary ‘charging batteries’ activity of the seasonal tourist brake; it is about a life-changing experience that may grant one something invaluable and unpayable: a sense of meaning, and one’s part in it.

The way in which the journey is performed — implying risks and the lack of comfort — will particularly appeal to young people of roughly the same age as the protagonists. This film tends to exert a specific attraction to people in between adolescence and adulthood: those who are not yet burdened by family and professional obligations but are sufficiently

2 Introduction independent from parents and relatives to be away from home on their own terms, for an extended period of time. The film does not only celebrate life, love and friendship — above all 1t celebrates youth. Youth as an age category, certainly, but also youth as a transnational emblem: the lowbudget formula of the journey allows for a strong global appeal, beyond the North-South axis.

That said, the specific experience of travelling across Latin America, rather than any other continent, is another key to the film’s success. Using cinema's ability to transpose its viewers to other parts of the world, this film can be considered a visual tourist guide to some of Latin America's most beautiful and iconic landscapes, as well as to the diversity of its culture and ethnicity. The protagonists drive through the Argentine Pampa, struggle against wind and snow in Patagonia, walk their way across the Atacama Desert, drag themselves forward on the steep mountain roads of the Andes and sail on the Amazon River. They dance with the wealthy and sit with the poor, ask questions about land ownership and share coca leaves with the descendants of the Incas. They take pictures on Machu Picchu and listen to a guide in Cuzco. The Motorcycle Diaries does what tourist brochures and websites can only partly achieve: draw one into a visually enticing journey and leave them with a hunger for more.

Finally, this film is about a political awakening. The historical figure of Che Guevara is the audiences’ link to years of revolutionary hope, but also tragic violence and repression. These years are the 1960s and 1970s, but the film returns to the decade prior to this period, when everything was yet to begin. Providing a prequel to the well-known public life of Guevara, the film impacts on his image on a global scale, emptying out negative connotations, opening up new readings that speak to a youth whose idealism has meanwhile found new conduits: anti-globalist thinking, activism, voluntarism. For an older generation, The Motorcycle Diaries taps into nostalgia for pre-neoliberal times, when other political formulas still seemed viable alternatives and positive feelings (hope, solidarity) were intensely lived. For those who take offense with Che Guevara — for instance, because of his belief in armed struggle — the film offers a purified evocation of his persona as it deals with the years prior to that part of his life.

Synopsis

Although inspired by Ernesto Guevara’s and Alberto Granado’s historic journeys across Latin America from late December 1951 to August 1952, the film can be enjoyed as a Latin American road movie on its own terms. It takes audiences on an eight-month journey that starts in Buenos Aires and ends in Caracas, where two friends in their 20s — one called ‘Mial’ (for

Introduction 3

Alberto Granado) and the other “Fuser” (for Ernesto Guevara) — temporarily part, only to be reunited again on Cuban soil years later (as the film briefly points out towards the end). After a family farewell in Buenos Aires and a short visit to Fuser’s girlfriend Chichina in Miramar, they drive across Patagonia and experience their first setbacks: their tent is blown away by the harsh wind and Fuser catches a severe cold.

The travel buddies nevertheless make it to Chile, where they need to resort to some tricks to cope with financial problems. They pose as famous ‘leper experts’ for a local newspaper, winning the esteem (and help) of the locals, and they develop an “anniversary routine’ to convince others to pay them a free lunch on the occasion of their supposed one-year anniversary of touring. They also experience lesser amusing things: a visit to the house of an old, dying lady deeply affects Fuser, who a few days earlier already had had to deal with a break-up letter from Chichina. As a reaction to the latter, perhaps, he accepts the advances of a Chilean woman during a dance party, but her husband catches them and Mial and Fuser need to hurry their way out. Shortly after, their motorcycle breaks down and the rest of the journey is accomplished on foot and by hitchhiking.

In the Atacama Desert, they meet a communist couple on their way to an American-owned Chilean copper mine and witness the miserable way in which these workers are treated by the supervisors. In Peru, they visit Machu Picchu and Cuzco, meet indigenous inhabitants and in Lima enjoy the hospitality of Dr. Pesce, Peru’s leading leprologist at the time. He recommends that they visit San Pablo, a leper community in the Amazon. After Fuser has a serious asthma attack on the boat, they arrive safely at the community and take part in the activities (medical and otherwise).

At the end of their stay, a birthday party is organised for Fuser by the medical staff and nuns during which he gives a speech on the unity of Latin America. Immediately after, he undertakes a dangerous swim to the other shore of the Amazon River, to join the leper patients and include them, symbolically at least, in the celebration. The day after, Mial and Fuser head for Venezuela on a raft — Fuser’s birthday present from the San Pablo community. They part in Caracas, where Mial has been offered a job as biochemist, and Fuser takes a return plane to Buenos Aires, with a stopover in Miami. A last shot transports us back to the time of the shooting and to Cuba, where the aged face of the real Mial (Alberto Granado) reminds the viewer of the historical dimension of the film. We learn that Alberto moved to Cuba on the invitation of his friend Fuser, who by then had become ‘commander Guevara’. The closing sentences of the film mention that Guevara, after his involvement in the Cuban Revolution, went on fighting for his ideals in Congo and Bolivia, where he was killed by the military in 1967.

4 Introduction Names and Chapters

As indicated in this summary, the film very clearly leads to the historic figure of the real Guevara, and no doubt, some of the viewers will be drawn to The Motorcycle Diaries as a biopic of a famous figure that marked 20th-century history in Latin America. However, Guevara is certainly not the only ‘celebrity’ linked to this film. When The Motorcycle Diaries was released, the actor portraying Fuser’s role was already very well known. Mexican-born actor Gael Garcia Bernal had already starred in two Mexican box-office hits that won international acclaim: Loves a Bitch/Amores perros (Iñárritu and Arriaga, 1999) and And Your Mother Too/Y tu mama también (Cuaron, 2002). His intense acting style and fluid sexuality, heightened by his later appearance as transgender in Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education/La mala educacion (2004), was not only cleverly used in The Motorcycle Diaries, it also allowed the film to share in Garcia Bernal’s growing international prestige. The names of the other Latin American directors for whom he had worked, and the almost simultaneous success of the other films released, created the effect of a cinematic “boom”, similar to what had happened in the 1960s when a new generation of highly talented Latin American novelists had come to the fore, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes.

Another star emerging out of what seemed a sudden outburst of talent was Gustavo Santaolalla, an Argentine composer and musician who had worked in Los Angeles and Mexico and who would become one of this century’s best-known film composers [winning Oscars for his compositions for Brokeback Mountain (Lee, 2005) and Babel (Iñárritu, 2006)]. His musical score for The Motorcycle Diaries, inspired by folk music from different areas, became as famous as the film itself. Interestingly, it was not Santaolalla but Uruguayan transnational musician and composer Jorge Drexler who would win an Oscar for the music in Salles” film. His song * Al otro lado del rio’ [On the other side of the river] is heard during the end credits and relates to the swimming scene in the final part.

As for the film’s director, Walter Salles already was a well-known name in Latin American cinema, thanks to Central do Brasil/Central Station (1998), an earlier road movie that won a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and exemplified the revival of Brazilian cinema from the mid- 1990s onwards. His exceptional position as a Brazilian transnational director with specific interest in the road movie genre was confirmed some years later, when he was invited to direct On the Road (2012), Kerouac’s seminal novel for the road movie genre. That said, compared to Garcia Bernal and Santaolalla, he is the lesser-known name in this illustrious trio — a man somewhat eclipsed by the success of his own film. I will therefore start my

Introduction 5 exploration of The Motorcycle Diaries by presenting Salles’ multifaceted oeuvre in Chapter 1. The other chapters take their inspiration from the basic plotline: a young man undertakes a journey across Latin America and ends up politically awakened. Youth is discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, which deal, respectively, with the notion of “emerging adulthood”, and the way in which the return to the 1950s ‘rejuvenates’ Che Guevara’s image. Chapters 4 and 5 relate to the travel experience of the protagonist, first through a discussion of the road movie aspect of the film, and then via its relation to tourism. Politics is at stake in the last chapter, which shows how Salles” representation of bodies in the film helps him to negotiate Guevara’s controversial legacy in political terms, in particular his relation to violence.

This short introduction presented the key information related to the film, the talent responsible for its success and the themes that permeate it. It 1s time to get the engines started and hit the road.

1 The Transnational Filmmaking of Walter Salles

In a book on youth culture and cinema, it may be useful to start a presentation of The Motorcycle Diaries by something which generally is overlooked: the director’s own youth. The first part of this chapter provides a brief overview of Walter Salles’ unusual childhood and adolescence followed by a summary of his work, which — as I will demonstrate — is diverse yet at the same time bound together by two characteristics: its transnational character and its interest in youth. After a discussion of these salient features, the chapter situates The Motorcycle Diaries in Salles’ oeuvre at large, focusing not only on convergences, but also on some discrepancies.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

In many respects, Walter Salles seems to have been born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. He saw the light in 1956 in Rio de Janeiro as the oldest of three sons of an illustrious couple. His father, Walther Moreira Salles — whose name he inherited — was a very successful banker, diplomat and politician, who after his retirement founded the Instituto Moreira Salles, one of the most important cultural institutions in Brazil.' His mother, Elisinha Gonçalves, was Walther Moreira’s second wife and a well-known figure in Brazil’s high society — there are still pictures of her dressed by the French fashion designer Givenchy to be found online. One of the three headquarters of the Instituto Moreira Salles is the Casa de Gavea in Rio de Janeiro, a beautiful spacious house, especially constructed for the Moreira Salles family, where they not only lived but also received celebrities and politicians from Brazil and abroad. A testimony of family life in this house can be found in Santiago (2007) by Joao Moreira Salles — Walter’s younger brother and a well-known documentary maker in Brazil. In this critically acclaimed film, the former butler of the family, Santiago, indirectly compares the Moreira Salles’ family to glorious families of the past, such as the art-loving De Médicis. On some evenings, there would have been over 200 people dining and dancing together at their sumptuous house.

The documentary, however, not only traces the splendour of the past but also a sadder period when the couple grew apart and silence and emptiness started to weigh on the house. Even before, their life of wealth and glamour seems to have had a negative impact on their children — their high profile implying that they were often absent or unavailable for their sons. A biography of father Walther Moreira Salles includes a chapter on family life, indicating that, for daily affection, the brothers needed to rely on each other as well as on the house maid Ema Luca (*Meminha”).? As an illiterate person coming from a background very different from one of the celebrities who visited the Casa de Gavea (the Rockefellers, Christina Onassis and Alain Delon), Meminha provided the link between the cosmopolitan upper-class world of the brothers and ‘ordinary people’. Both the warm and sympathetic portrayal of lower-class characters in Salles’ films later on and the recurrent motif of brotherhood in these films could have been inspired by these aspects of Salles’ biographical background.

Another element that also marks Walter’s young years is mobility. When Brazil became a dictatorship in 1964, father Walther — who had served as Minister of Finance in the leftist government of President Joao Goulart (1961-1964) and feared reprisals by the military — thought it wiser for his family to move to France. For a period of four years Walter and his brothers were raised in Paris, something which seems to have shed the basis for a life-long relationship with France, and a near-native fluency in the French language. At the same time, the figure of the absent parent became even more acute in these years: Walther, the father, remained in Brazil to attend to business, joining his family only for short stays in France or during their annual holidays in Brazil.* After the children and their mother made their final return to Brazil in 1968, the relations between the parents deteriorated and they divorced in 1976. A biographical source suggests that Walter — a teenager at the time — suffered from the growing tension between his parents.’ At the early age of 16 years, he took the important decision to leave home. He first moved in with his half-brother Fernando — the son of his father’s first marriage — who he had grown very close to, and two years later with João Bosco, an uncle who not only opened the doors of his 50 sqm apartment to his nephew (Nassif 2019: 424), but also introduced him to the more multicultural (and particularly African) side of Brazil. Up to that point, Walter's international upbringing had acquainted him with a cosmopolitan and particularly European culture rather than a Latin American one. Yet, it would not be long before his name entered the world of contemporary Latin American cinema, turning him into one of its most important and beloved representatives.

8 Transnational Filmmaking of Walter Salles Salles” Films: A Short Overview

Walter Salles” work in relation to film is, in fact, very multifaceted. He is not only a film director, but also a film producer, especially (but not exclusively) through Videofilmes, an independent production and distribution house he co-founded with his brother João Moreira Salles in 1987 which, through its support of several arthouse films, has succeeded in counterbalancing the more commercially oriented production houses in Brazil, such as Globofilmes (Korfmann and Kepler 2010). Moreover, his involvement in the Instituto Moreira Salles, co-directed by him and his brothers, implies that his influence stretches from the world of film to other realms of art such as photography, literature, music and visual art.* In other words, he is not only a successful director but also a key cultural agent in Brazil.

At the beginning of his career, however, things were more difficult. Brazil’s long military dictatorship (1964-1985) weighed heavily on freedom of expression in the country and provided little intellectual stimulus for debuting artists. It is not surprising that Walter Salles, after his studies in economics in Rio de Janeiro and his master's in Audiovisual Communication at the University of Southern California, started his career in Brazil outside of the specific domain of cinema, in television and advertising. To a certain extent, this early start would prove to be a benefit rather than a hindrance, as it made him familiar with a form of visual language that allowed Salles to attract wide audiences while also giving him the opportunity to make his first documentaries, not only for the Brazilian television, but also for the French-German television channel TV Arte. In this context, Salles delivered documentaries on Brazilian artists such as Chico Buarque and Tom Jobim, but also a short series on Japan. In a way, he was already acting as cultural mediator between Brazil and the rest of the world — a function which would continue through his feature-length films, and which he inherited, mutatis mutandis, from his father, who had been a diplomat.

Once Brazil returned to democracy, the situation for filmmakers paradoxically worsened. Under the influence of the Washington Consensus, and similar to what was happening in other Latin American countries at the time, a neoliberal plan of austerity was imposed on public spending in Brazil by the then president Fernando Collor de Mello (1990—1992). For Brazilian filmmakers it erased existing forms of state support overnight, both at the institutional level (Embrafilmes — the state's subsidising body for film — was closed) and the legal one (tax reduction for private funding of films was eliminated). Film production in Brazil dropped to zero. With the help of his own production house Videofilmes, Walter Salles managed to shoot A Grand Arte/Exposure, his first feature length film and the only Brazilian film to come out in 1991. Based on the titular novel by Brazilian writer Rubem Fonseca, this film noir about an American photographer in Rio de Janeiro was entirely shot in English to reach an international audience but remained relatively unnoticed. Not giving in to discouragement, Salles went on to shoot Terra estrangeira/Foreign Land in 1995, his second feature-length film and first project in collaboration with Daniela Thomas, a Brazilian playwright with whom Salles would work more often in the future. Shot in Portuguese in stylish black and white, this film noir earned Salles critical acclaim (Cakoff 1995). It portrayed the return journey of an immigrant’s son to Spain and struck a chord with a generation of young Brazilians who had become estranged from their country of birth after 20 years of dictatorship and a difficult transition to democracy. The film’s title, Foreign Land, therefore, has a double meaning as it refers not only to Spain, but also to homeland Brazil.

Meanwhile, the new government under President Itamar Franco (1992— 1995) had launched important initiatives to pull Brazilian filmmakers out of the swamp, including the introduction of the Audiovisual Law and Rouanet Law in 1993, which facilitated the return of state support. A first important success was Carlota Joaquina, princesa do Brazil/Carlota Joaquina, Princess of Brazil (Camurati 1993), which was watched by over a million viewers in Brazil theatres (Nagib 2007: xviii). The critical acclaim for Foreign Land in the festival circuit two years on added to the renewed confidence. But it was Salles' third feature film, Central Station, which would become the emblem ofthe recovery of Brazilian cinema from the mid-1990s onwards, also known as “the Retomada' or ‘re-emergence’ of Brazilian cinema (Pinazza 2013: 32). Entirely set in Brazil and shot in Portuguese, Central Station is considered as Salles” ‘home-coming’ to Brazil and its cinematic tradition (Sadlier 2013). The film depicts the journey of a middle-aged woman and a young boy from Rio de Janeiro to the poor region of the North-East, also known as the Sertáo (the Backlands). Placing itself in dialogue with Brazil’s political generation of filmmakers in the 1960s, known as “Cinema Novo”, Central Station revisited the iconic region of the Sertáo and refigured it as a place of hopeful belonging. The film enjoyed great success in Brazil as well as abroad. It won a Golden and a Silver Bear in Berlin (respectively for ‘Best Film’ and ‘Best Actress") and was nominated for two Academy Awards (for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ and ‘Best Actress in a Leading Role”). Moreover, the film helped Salles establish important international contacts, with Robert Redford's Sundance Institute subsidising the script writing, and Swiss producer Arthur Cohn providing co-financing.

These two names returned for Salles” next two films. Arthur Cohn financed his Abril despedagado /Behind the Sun (2001), a magical realist film based on the titular novel by Nobel prize winner Ismael Kadare and transposed onto Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century. Robert Redford, on the other hand, approached Salles for what would become his greatest commercial success and for which Redford himself acted as executive producer, The Motorcycle Diaries. Similar to Central Station, this film turned into an emblem, but this time not for Brazil's cinematic renewal (the film was shot in Spanish outside of Brazil’s borders), but for the breakthrough of Latin America at large in the global film market. Important new directors, such as Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Pablo Trapero and Lucrecia Martel, had come to the fore and Walter Salles was part of that list.

Salles” international prestige was confirmed with On the Road (2012), a film based on the novel by Jack Kerouac published in 1957 and entirely shot in the United States. For this film, Salles worked with international stars such as Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund, but also teamed up again with Gustavo Santaolalla and José Rivera, who had composed the music and authored the script of The Motorcycle Diaries, respectively. Simultaneously, Salles continued his collaboration with Daniela Thomas for Linha de passe/A Brazilian Family (2008), a feature-length film about four boys raised by a single mother, one of whom tries to make it into the world of football. With Daniela Thomas, Salles also made two short films: O Primeiro Dia/Midnight (1998) — part of a film project of TV Arte dedicated to the turn of the millennium — and Loin du seizieme/Far from the Sixteenth (2006), set in Paris as part of a cinematic omnibus on the city of Paris. While the former depicts a romance between a middle-class woman and a favela outlaw character, the latter focuses on a Latin American nanny — and herself a young mother — in Paris’ richest neighbourhood (the 16th arrondissement). Commenting on his collaboration with Thomas, Salles conjectured that her rather sceptical view on society to some extent counterbalances his own more optimistic take on it.* Salles’ own films have indeed been said to focus more on the resilience of the characters he describes and less on the depressing side of the precarious situations in which they live (Xavier 2003: 60), something which has earned him the label ‘humanist’ (Ruffinelli 2001: 611).

His inspiration for this ‘humanist message’ were, according to his own account,’ Frans Krajcberg and Maria do Socorro Nobre, two people he worked with in his early documentary work, Socorro Nobre (1995). Krajcberg is a Polish Jewish artist who migrated to Brazil. Socorro Nobre is a Brazilian woman serving a long prison sentence in the same country. The two are related through the device and motif of the letter that Socorro Nobre wrote to Krajcberg one day to thank him for his work as an artist. His sculptures — inspired by the vegetal energy of the Amazonian jungle — not only cured the artist of his traumas from the Holocaust, but also helped Socorro Nobre find a new meaning in life. The motif of the letter, and the feelings of hope and redemption it conveys, returns in Central Station, in which the main character is a professional letter writer, and Socorro Nobre herself briefly appears in the opening scenes (see Figure 1.1). The insertion of “real-life” figures is a frequent practice in Salles” films and also indicates their connectedness to the genre of the documentary. As a matter of fact, Salles? most recent work to date is a documentary on Jia Zhang Ke, a Chinese filmmaker whom Salles greatly admires, under the title Jia Zhang Ke, a Guy from Fenyang (2016).

As mentioned earlier, Salles’ engagement with cinema transcends his creative work. Thus, he has also worked as a director-for-hire for the horror film Dark Water (2005) — a remake of a Japanese film? — and, through the Instituto Moreira Salles and Videofilmes, he has overseen the restoration and distribution of older films from Latin America, such as Mario Peixoto’s Limite/Limit (1930) and Patricio Guzman’s La batalla de Chile/The Battle of Chile (1979). His work as a producer has also left an imprint on contemporary Latin American cinema. Of particular importance are Madam Satá/ Madam Satan (Ainouz 2002) and Cidade de Deus/City of God (Meirelles and Lund 2002), two other iconic films for the Retomada, both co-produced by Walter Salles. Featuring black actors in leading roles, still an exception in Brazilian cinema at the time, and combining an interest in Brazilian themes (samba singers and the favela) with an awareness of global issues (LBGTQ+and drugs trafficking), these films introduced modernity into conventional film language in Brazilian cinema’ and replaced the victimist portrayals of marginalised characters with a more ambivalent one. In City of God, the protagonist ultimately succeeds in leaving the favela, thanks to his work as photographer; in Madam Satan, the main character (based on a historical person) ends up dancing as a drag queen at the Brazilian carnival, which was his personal dream.

Figure 1.1 Socorro Nobre appears in the opening scenes of Central Station

12 Transnational Filmmaking of Walter Salles Transnationality

Walter Salles has been presented as ‘Brazil’s most exportable contemporary filmmaker’ (Pinazza and Bayman 2013: 6). His ability to reach both a Brazilian and an international audience has turned him into a prime example of ‘a transnational director” (Shaw 2013: 27), a filmmaker experienced in cross-border collaboration and having a particular talent for endowing an international film language with ‘local’ accents and concerns. The fact that his films have been shot in different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese) and have been produced by crews and artists from different countries is perhaps the most direct proof of this transnational character. Of course, Latin American cinema, much like cinemas in the rest of the world, has had a strong international dimension from its beginning, with tango dancer Carlos Gardel fascinating viewers from the days of the silent cinema onwards, Carmen Miranda's image as “Brazilian bombshell’ with her signature fruit hat travelling the world and songs like ‘Alla en el rancho grande’/‘Over there at the Rancho Grande’ becoming international hits.

However, after the commercial successes of the 1940s and 1950s, during which countries such as Brazil, Mexico and Argentina developed their own national film industries but with a highly exportable product, a reaction set in during the 1960s and 1970s, which became known as the ‘New Latin American Cinema’ and included the Cinema Novo-movement referred to earlier. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, this movement strived for a new kind of cinema that would reject the formulas of US cinema (identified with entertainment only) as well as European cinema (identified with ‘art’ cinema). The aspiration was to design a typically Latin American cinema through ‘an aesthetics of hunger”'” — an artistic programme based on the possibility of converting the poor conditions of filmmaking in Latin America into a source of creativity and critical reflection on poverty and underdevelopment as consequences of systemic injustice. In reality, several of its main representatives (such as Tomas Gutiérrez Alea and Glauber Rocha) had studied in Europe and were influenced by Italian neorealism — a movement that encouraged filmmakers to take their cameras into the street and work with non-professional actors instead of stars. But in Latin America’s 1960s the emphasis was on the need to break free from earlier models and establish a cinema of one’s own, rather than on foregrounding any links to earlier trends.