Context 2004–14: Postdictatorship, Postneoliberalism, and New Argentine Cinema

The films on the civic responses to the 2001 financial crisis, which the previous chapter described, illustrated a fidelity to earlier political and cinematic visions by the festival. Those films, celebrating “auto-organisations” that emerged organically as responses to the crisis, were part of films’ role as transmitters of national narratives, desires, and struggles. In this way, the festival, and the films selected to represent that time, form part of a wider struggle that had to do with reassertions of a nation in the face of external invasions both economically and cinematically. The origins of FICDH were entwined with the reassertion of a national cinema that had all but disappeared until the law of 1994 (Copertari 2009; Falicov 2007; Page 2011), one that had, furthermore, played an integral role in Argentine nation-building (Lusnich and Piedras 2009). The festival can be seen to be part of the rejuvenation of a cultural industry neutered in its ability to tell its own stories to itself. But it was also part of the repositioning of a politics that had been decimated. In this way, FICDH forms part of a broader vision both politically and cinematically, one that was trying to rescue a nation from disintegration. Its national cinema and the anti-imperialist and radical politics of Third Cinema, with its emphasis on self-representation and autonomous self-definition, had been a significant element of that prior to the dictator-ship.