Previous research has addressed the role media have played in shaping the way we live together or how we make sense of current affairs; media and popular culture have also contributed to build up national identities and to make (in)visible voices, communities, or social issues across cultures and time. Media has been key in the way we understand the past and how we make sense of it. Various studies have addressed historical discourses and representations, the way audiences make sense of media content about contemporary history, or to what extent different media contribute (or not) to broadening the portrayals of societies’ pasts (Antezana & Cabalin, 2023; Cabalin et al., forthcoming; Dettlef, 2018; 2021; Garde-Hansen, 2011; Lopes, 2023; Mihelj & Huxtable, 2018; Sánchez, 2024; Zelizer, 2001; Zelizer & Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2014).
(Re)writing collective memories is also at the heart of current political disputes across the globe and the media is a crucial part of it. Visual representations are particularly relevant due to its powerful emotional appeal. Post-conflict societies are particularly critical contexts in symbolically addressing and representing violence in its multiple forms when it comes to remembering and framing violence.
Societies dealing with troubling pasts are at the foreground to critically explore contemporary challenges to better understand how visual production disputes their ways in shaping memories. Despite the particular features of each Ibero American country, audiovisual production is very influential across the region (OBITEL, 2025). Then, contemporary citizens are navigating mediated environments (Averbeck-Lietz, 2011).
This panel discusses specific audiovisual productions portraying post-conflict societies, focusing on cases in which internal conflict, dictatorship, and colonialism are involved. It also essays epistemological and methodological perspectives to better understand how these visual artifacts contribute to building up contemporary memories about our recent past and their glocal implications.
Parallel lives, parallel tales. How history is a narrative that answers to its writer, James A. Dettleff, PUCP (Peru)
After two decades of violence during the Internal Armed Conflict (IAC, 1980-1999), several Peruvian films were made over the following ten years, portraying that period and the deep wounds it left in the country. The politicians and the civil society have not been able to perform the much-needed mourning for those violent years, but cultural products have offered symbolic representations that contribute to critical thinking about the conflict and how Peruvian society lived through it (Vich, 2015). Almost all those films crafted tales about civilians as the primary victims of the conflict. Very few addressed the armed forces or the terrorists as victims, despite the extended human rights violations they also endured. One film was backed by the Peruvian armed forces, Vidas paralelas (Parallels lives). The movie develops the story of two friends whose paths were separated when they were young, but later found themselves at odds: one, an army official and the other a senderista (a member of the terrorist organization Sendero Luminoso). The film aims to “respond” to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report and to films considered liberal versions of the conflict. According to the Peruvian armed forces, the TRC and other cultural narratives about the conflict, blamed them as the sole perpetrators and did not recognize the military’s sacrifices and their patriotic service. This paper analyzes how the film Vidas paralelas portrays the IAC, the armed forces, and terrorist players from a military perspective. It discusses the discourses emphasized by the film: Heroism, sacrifice, and injustice are the main characteristics embodied by the military characters, while terrorists represent irrationality, fear, and revenge.
El último bastión and the sense-making of the homeland, Giuliana Cassano, PUCP (Perú)
This paper analyzes the contemporary political and social Peruvian society through the lenses that the TV show The last bastion (El último bastión) provides and how and to what extent this TV series inspired by historical events speaks to contemporary Peru. In 2021, when celebrating two centuries of national independence, Netflix launched the first Peruvian fiction TV show, The last bastion. The show was entirely produced by TV Perú, the State broadcaster. This historical fiction portrays Peruvian independence and through its characters’ representations, the show critically addresses what homeland is and what it means. The series depicts the then polarized Peruvian society, the expectations, hopes, and fears of Peruvians, and their processes of becoming an independent Nation. But El último… also prompted a dialogue intervening in present times to better understand Peruvian history, its myths, and the truthfulness of facts that had founded it.
One of the more compelling and complex perspectives this show embraces is its portrayal of women’s role in building up the Peruvian homeland. This is remarkable as long as these female characters embrace such a patriotic endeavour even though they have embodied suffering, violated, unrespected, and despised. Nonetheless, female characters in The last… want to have a Nation and embrace the challenges that independence entails.
Although The last bastion speaks about the past, it also refers to the current Peruvian moment. Indeed, it explores social, cultural, or political wounds, as well as the challenges the contemporary Peruvian society faces to develop democratic, participatory, and fair ways of living together. El último… allows us to critically examine both past and present problems in a Latin American country, such as citizenry, integration, inclusion, a shared history, and discrimination based on gender, class, and race.
Memory, fiction, and silence in Banzo, by Margarida Cardoso Pedro Lopes (FCH-Católica), Co-author: Miguel Rico (Universidade NOVA), Portugal Banzo (2025), a feature film by Margarida Cardoso, has been nominated by the Academia Portuguesa de Cine (the Portuguese Academy of Filming) as its candidate for the Oscar Awards. The movie is a powerful effort to rebuild both the social and historical Portuguese memories by exploring colonial wounds and the traces a buried past has left. Through this feature film, the director critically revisits Portuguese colonialism; in this particular story she does so by revisiting a cocoa plantation in São Tomé and Príncipe (Central Africa) at the beginning of 20th Century and how slaves embraced death, a practice known as banzo or slaves’ nostalgia. This paper analyzes how and to what extent Banzo questions official narratives that have shaped Portuguese collective memory. It does so by revealing marginalized, historically silenced, voices. In this context, fiction is a space of possibility in which imagination turns into a political tool to re-build experiences erased from the colonial archives. Then, we explore what narratives the director writes when filmmaking becomes an act of memory. Margarida Cardoso rearranges the past from the present, dismantling colonizer and colonized hierarchies and making evident the persistent traumas of history. Then, who owns the past? Banzo offers an ethics of listening, paying attention to silences, to gestures, and to what is absent when structuring the collective forgetting. Therefore, this paper stresses the role that fiction plays as a device in reconstructing memory; it also emphasizes how Banzo transforms filmmaking into a place of resistance in which the colonial past is re-written not only as a memory, but as a field of symbolic dispute.
Epistemological and methodological challenges in exploring media portrayals of memories and violence in IberoAmerican countries. A few notes.
Dr. Claudia Lagos Lira, U. de Chile (Chile)
How to theoretically and methodologically draw the line to define a specific object of research in visual media? What are the specificities of visual productions exploring the intersections of a diverse array of violences in contemporary history? Are there any chances to cross paths when comparing very different visual productions regarding their conditions of production and their contexts of circulation? And if so, what would be the best strategies to address the multiplicity of challenges coming up of analyzing memory, violence, and post-conflict societies through visual productions that are by definition polysemic? The papers presented in this panel address very different objects of study and visual artifacts: Feature films, a TV show produced for a streaming service, produced in different Ibero American countries, problematizing specific historical milestones that frame collective memories. Then, are there patterns, big or small structures of sense-making, of storytelling, of poetic or descriptive images in movement giving some clues to better understand Ibero American contemporary and contested visual memories?
20260729T154520260729T1715America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires3.13. What memories? What violences? What frames? Films and television portrayals of post-conflict societiesSVE3MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
