Friday December 5, 2025 |  1:45PM-3:30PM

LBC 208 Korach

Presenters

• Nathan Rossi (Northwestern University), “Aftershocks: Queer Narratives in the Growth of Transnational Central American Cinema”

One of the ripple effects of the increase in film production in Central America in the twenty-first century (Espinoza and List, 2023) has been the emergence of a queer discourse in cinema. This paper examines two of the first queer narratives in the region, Jayro Bustamante’s Temblores (2019) and Li Cheng’s José (2018). Both set in Guatemala City, these films are emblematic of transnational developments in independent film and queer cultural production. Yet, I argue that while they are influenced by recent trends in queer cinema that have sought to emphasize a low-key realism, these Guatemalan entries employ a naturalism that is characteristic of Central American cinema’s longstanding tradition of politically oriented documentary storytelling. Temblores and José employ verisimilitude to bring attention to how queer men navigate their gayness in contemporary Guatemala City based on their racial, religious, and socio-economic identities. Temblores critiques the creeping influence of evangelicalism in contemporary Guatemala and the ways in which it upholds stringent heteronormative patriarchal values. José focuses on a working-class teen coming of age and suggests that migration north may be the only way for his queerness to prosper. Read together they demonstrate how the establishment of a queer discourse in Guatemala City through cinema is a positive development. Still, these films also elucidate the precarity and violence that queers living in urban spaces continue to face.

• Vinodh Venkatesh (Virginia Tech), “Circular Fatalisms in Jayro Bustamante’s Temblores”

While Latin American cinema, understood as a multitude of national markets, circuits, and auteurs, has seen an uptick in feature films that delve into issues of gender and sexuality, Central American film has largely remained at the margins. Though several scholars in the last decade have published monographs and anthologies on Latin American LGBTQ cinema (Subero, Castillo and Lema-Hincapié, Venkatesh, Maguire), films from Central America have gone unexplored. The purpose of this presentation is to first provide a brief overview of Central American films that delve into LGBTQ issues and representation, to identify broad trends and themes. Second, I analyze Jayro Bustamante’s Temblores (Guatemala, 2019), paying close attention to how the film employs and develops certain narrative, aesthetic, and affective dimensions that are present in films from the recent Latin American LGBTQ boom. In reading the film, I argue that Bustamante’s final thesis, however, is not emancipatory or progressive, but rather rooted in an almost magical-realist fatalism that can also be seen in other entries in the director’s oeuvre.

• Maria Isabel Messina (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, chair and moderator), “Affective Archive in Motion: Audiovisual Testimony, Trans Subjectivity, and the Intimacy of Listening”

This theoretical-practical paper offers a reflection from the perspective of anthropology on audiovisual testimony as an affective archive in motion, based on the documentary Nuestras Historias, created as part of my doctoral research. The project, centered on the life stories of trans women in Guatemala, (re)constructs an affective cartography that explores how affect shapes vital spaces through presences and absences—made tangible in narrative experience and recoverable in everyday life.
The affective portraits were created in dialogue with the protagonists, whose stories were interpreted and condensed through attentive and sensitive listening. These short films are the result of performative co-creations that acknowledge the place of enunciation of each trans woman, the narrative role of the researcher, and the cinematographic gaze—together challenging the boundaries between representation and agency.
This presentation invites us to think of the audiovisual archive not merely as a container of memory, but as a space where affect produces knowledge and reconfigures the epistemic frameworks through which trans lives are narrated. What forms of knowledge become possible when we speak from affect? What happens when stories long relegated to the margins move to the center?
In this act of appearance, what becomes visible is not only a life journey, but also a gesture of subjective and collective affirmation. The testimonial moment thus emerges not only as an act of memory, but as a way to reimagine the present through agency, dignity, and the desire to exist.

• Mary Leonard (University of Cincinnati), “Movements in Puerto Rican Film and Media: Wandering, Breaking Out, Returning”

Film and media are ontological. Mimetically or metaphorically, they represent aspects of lived experience. When media produced in a particular context are examined together they can provide insight into the zeitgeist in a particular time and place. This talk is about three movements associated with film and media in Puerto Rico that, like currents at play on the surface of the sea, signal the presence of forces below it. The first consists of a group of films made just before, during, and after the 2014 economic crisis, that are characterized by a wandering structure. Melancholic or agitated characters go nowhere, search, or seek to escape. Some end nihilistically with violence or death or a forced return to stasis. Others embody what Glissant calls errantry – wandering that seeks relation – and end inconclusively. The second movement is breaking out. It consists of media largely created between 2014 and now, a period of disasters, social and political upheaval, and economic decline that has been met with a culture of resistance. Media associated with it are highly performative, combative, and fashionable. They are associated with street culture and urban music, and push boundaries. The third movement is one of returning as seen in a turn towards history in contemporary popular media, and in recent scholarship around the history of film in Puerto Rico that is complicating and enriching existing narratives, and making it possible to reconnect with the past in new ways. This talk will be accompanied by visual illustrations of these movements.