Dr Lorena Cervera, a Senior Lecturer on the BA (Hons) Film Production degree at Arts University Bournemouth (AUB), has released her first book, A Feminist Counter-History of Latin American Documentary.
The book revisits the history of documentary in Latin America from a feminist perspective. With a focus on documentaries with clear political intents, it illustrates some of the thematic interests, production practices, and aesthetic strategies employed by women filmmakers between the early 1970s and the mid-1990s.
Lorena says, “Over these years, women around the world were gaining greater access to education and employment, were inspired by ideas of emancipation and equality, and formed movements that challenged traditional gender roles.
“One of the events that facilitated the rapid circulation of feminist ideas on a global scale was the UN World Conference on Women, held in Mexico City in 1975. This was the first of four conferences whose main objective was to tackle gender inequalities by involving women in decision-making.”
Amid this uprising, women filmmakers across Latin America added to this momentum by making films and videos that disrupted the representations of women on screen, challenged their seclusion from the public sphere, and both fuelled and documented feminist campaigns and events. Despite the magnitude and significance of feminist cinema, its influence remains largely unspoken.
Through analysis of the contexts, processes, and forms of a selection of films in her book, Lorena shows how these non-fiction films shed light on the precarious conditions that characterised women’s greater entry into the workforce, on the circulation of feminist ideas, and on the inevitable questioning of identity that resulted from migration and displacement.
Lorena is a filmmaker, writer, and educator; holding a PhD from UCL and has published various articles and chapters on documentary filmmaking, feminist film collectives, and Latin American cinema. Currently, she teaches documentary and film history and culture at AUB.
As a filmmaker, she's directed several documentaries, including Pilas (2019), #PrecarityStory (2020), and Processing Images from Caracas (2023).
