Female directors of argentine and spanish cinema. A decade re-creating imaginary

Resumen

Even though Latin American cinema is well consolidated now, there are not many comparative studies besides generalist approaches. This article presents an inventory of female Argentine and Spanish directors, as well as their films, from 2000 to 2010, a period marked by the generational change in film industry of both countries and determined by a sociopolitical context democratically consolidated and hampered by economic fluctuations. The objective is twofold: to make women filmmakers visible and to assess their meeting points and divergences. As a method, we chose a descriptive design, applying both a quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis. We conducted a compilation, synthesis, and correlation of works and themes, reaching a corpus of 72 female directors and 138 productions. The results show that there are common issues that reveal the report of unsolved situations for women: motherhood, female homosociality or ideas about love and sex, the experience or the memory of repression, the structural violence of the authoritarian state and the transformations of the ways of life. There are also differences in terms of times and opportunities, styles and genders, which are typical of the coexistence of diverse but creative film trajectories, all of which are stories that break with limited social models and open up to social commitment.