9.15. Cinematic Memory in Latinamerica [ES/EN]

The film “I’m still here” was a phenomenon in 2025. Premiering in 42 countries, the feature film led Brazil to receive its first Oscar for foreign film in March 2025. By April 4, 2025, two days before it was added to the Globoplay streaming catalog, 5.8 million people had watched the film in movie theaters. The film tells the story of the disappearance of deposed congressman Rubens Paiva during the civil-military dictatorship (1964-1985). In this work, we analyze how the film represents the memory of the dictatorship and its opponents, as well as how the film impacted society and its relationship with memory policies (or the lack thereof) regarding the dictatorship in Brazil (Gallo, 2016). “I’m still here” is intrinsically linked to the information gathered by the National Truth Commission on the torture, murder, and concealment of the body of former congressman Rubens Paiva. At the same time, the absence of a consistent policy on remembering Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship also impacts the film. The two time lapses show moments of state recognition of Rubens Paiva’s murder by the military: the death certificate in 1996 and the findings of the National Truth Commission in 2014. If there were a consistent memory policy in Brazil, would it be necessary for cinema to tell these stories in this way? Using the method of film analysis, we will examine the representation of the “enemies” of the dictatorship in “I'm still here” (Hall, 2013). In addition, the presence of memory politics in the film's narrative and in its mimesis 3, when the audience engages with the narrative (Ricoeur, 1994), will be observed through statements made by Brazilian authorities about the dictatorship as part of the film's repercussions.

During the 1960s, within the broader context of the Cold War, much of Latin America faced a severe economic crisis and growing social and ideological polarization. In this climate, many governments in the region turned increasingly authoritarian and, in several cases, established military dictatorships through coups d’état. These regimes deployed extensive repressive apparatuses against civil society, systematically violating human rights. Following the return to democracy, post-dictatorial societies were confronted with the challenge of constructing narratives about that traumatic past. This process involved the ongoing configuration and revision of collective memory concerning state terrorism. Within this framework, cinema has played an active and influential role. Fiction films, in particular, have contributed to shaping historical narratives that—alongside other cultural artifacts—participate in the collective and mass-mediated representation of the past. Building on the intersections between cinema, history, and memory, this study examines how that past is represented in cinematic productions, focusing specifically on the depiction of repressors and state repressive practices through the theoretical lens of film semiotics. While the analysis takes as its starting point the visual representation within the filmic discourse, it also situates these representations within their broader social and historical contexts. The aim is to explore the extent to which such portrayals reproduce, challenge, or reconfigure the dominant social imaginary; how they engage with contemporary debates, processes, and memory policies in each national context; and what similarities and differences emerge across them.

The civic–military dictatorship led by General Alfredo Stroessner, established through a coup d’état in 1954, dominated Paraguayan political and cultural life for over three decades until its fall in 1989. Fourteen years later, the Comisión de Verdad y Justicia (CVJ) was created to investigate human rights violations committed under the regime. The gradual transition from covert rumor to public documentation—without entirely displacing the former—constitutes a central cultural dynamic in the ongoing construction of memory surrounding the Stroessner era. This process reflects the tensions between silence and testimony, denial and recognition, that continue to shape Paraguay’s democratic culture today. In line with the conference’s focus on memory and democratic resilience, this paper explores the role of art, literature, and film in shaping the collective memory of the Stroessner dictatorship. It examines how transformations in collective remembrance have been processed and initiated through artistic and media forms, and to what extent these cultural practices create spaces for public debate, pluralism, and democratic participation. At the same time, literature and cinema probe the effects of state terror on both individual and collective psychosocial levels, often across multiple generations. Far from merely depicting the dictatorship era, literary and cinematic works trace its afterlives and document the diverse—and often contested—modes of remembrance. The paper also highlights the significant metamemorial dimension present in literature and cinema, which confront and dismantle narratives seeking to revive the dictatorship’s image as propagated by its ideologues during the Stroessner era. Ultimately, literature and film emerge as invaluable tools for examining not only the dictatorship—its enduring legacies and the dynamics of memory—but also the underlying conditions that continue to sustain its most persistent adherents.

This paper examines Maite Alberdi’s La Memoria Infinita (2023) as a metamemory text that stages the intimate relationship between time, affect, and remembrance in contemporary Chile. Through the love story of journalist Augusto Góngora and actress Paulina Urrutia, which was filmed over five years as Góngora’s Alzheimer progresses, Alberdi constructs a cinematic meditation on how personal and collective memory co-constitute one another. Drawing on Astrid Erll’s theory of traveling memory, Marianne Hirsch’s notion of the affiliative look, and Carlo Rovelli’s reflections on time, I argue that the film proposes a poetics of time that reconfigures the past as a living and ethical presence rather than a closed temporal register. Through its non-linear structure and interweaving of home movies, news archives, and observational footage, the documentary transforms the archive from a repository of loss into a site of becoming where remembering is a gesture oriented toward the future. Situating Alberdi’s work within Chile’s long trajectory of postdictatorial memory cinema, from Patricio Guzmán’s La Memoria Obstinada to Nostalgia de la Luz, the paper suggests that La Memoria Infinita extends this lineage by shifting the political register of memory into an affective and domestic one. Ultimately, I propose that Alberdi’s film enacts an ethics of care that resists the erasure of both personal and national identity, transforming the act of remembering into a shared affective experience, one that is, as its title suggests, infinite.

The two Brazilian films with the greatest international resonance in recent years – I'm Still Here (Walter Salles, 2024) and The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025) – share a common return to the period of the Military Dictatorship (1964–1985). Both works employ new narrative and aesthetic strategies to confront a memory that remains latent within an increasingly conservative and authoritarian society. This research examines these two films through the theoretical lens of the so called “spectral turn” in philosophy and the humanities. For Derrida (1993), the specter is a figure of return that inhabits the interstice between the visible and the invisible, evoking memories suppressed by official history. Juliana Martínez (2020), in turn, coined the notion of spectral realism to describe contemporary Latin American narratives that represent violence in oblique, elusive, and multisensory ways, eschewing the direct exhibition of brutality. Each in its own way, the films studied here adhere to this emerging trend, drawing on haunting, estrangement, and spectral atmospheres. In I'm Still Here, the real case of the disappearance of Congressman Rubens Paiva – whose body was never found – signals, through its very absence, the enduring presence of the specters of the military dictatorship, whose effects still reverberate across Brazilian society. The film’s haptic and multisensory aesthetic, suggesting more than it shows, aligns closely with Martínez’s concept of spectral realism. The Secret Agent turns to the fantastic and the uncanny – Freud’s unheimlich, the conceptual point of departure for Fabián Ludueña’s spectrology (2010 2021) – to construct a narrative in which the characters themselves drift in disorientation and estrangement from reality. Its ironic and chaotic depiction of the dictatorial period simultaneously functions as a commentary on contemporary state violence, dissolving chronological temporality and portraying Brazil as a space of continuous catastrophe.