Southern Hegemonies and Metaphors of the Global South in También La Lluvia

Abstract

Contemporary transnational Latin American cinema provides numerous instances of filmmaking praxis in which the hardly compatible agendas of neoliberalism and decolonization conflict with each other. Walter Mignolo’s decolonial aesthetics and Siba Grovogui’s metaphoric geopolitics illustrate such conflict particularly well as it conflates in the geopolitical term Global South. Transnational films such as Icíar Bollaín’s 2010 fictional docudrama También la lluvia/Even the Rain often bespeak a plurality of overlaying and sometimes conflicting “souths.” These are variously positioned in the matrix of subjugations alongside the intersecting social categories of nationality, race, class or gender. Set against the historical contexts of Columbus’s first contact with the Taino people and the 2000 Cochabamba Water War, También la lluvia mobilizes notions of hegemony and exploitation while pondering the role of cinema as a tool for social justice in a globalized world of multiple, often unintelligible subjugations. Situated in the critical spaces between countries, eras, genders and races, También la lluvia contests in a highly original way prevalent modes of neoliberal film production and consumption in Latin America.