This year’s issue takes a particularly diverse approach towards Screen Arts, encompassing a wide range of media, from documentary, film, and streaming to music video. Several of the articles center on marginalized communities and peripheral identities within Spain, Colombia, and Guatemala.
Marta Pérez-Pereiro and Silvia Roca-Baamonde provide an analysis of Margarita Ledo Andión’s recent Galician documentary Nación. Situating the film within the context of Ledo Andión’s theoretical writings and broader cinematic practices, they show how Nación revindicates the voices of working-class women in both the construction of Galician national identity and the class struggle. Gema Vela examines the politics of space and setting in the recent Netlix series Paquita Salas. In attending to the representation of both the domestic sphere and the workplace, she shows how the series overturns and subverts heteronormative configurations of space.
Federico Duplá, Miguel Fernández Labayen, and Francisco Utray explore the frequently overlooked role of the director of cinematography in Spanish cinema, focusing on the case of Javier Aguirresarobe. The authors trace the mobility of Aguirresarobe’s career as he has moved from Spanish cinema to Hollywood, showing the ways in which his trajectory reveals the structural differences between the two industries.
Both Cheri Robinson’s and Marcelo Carosi’s articles explore visual cultural productions that have been made to address contexts in which traditional forms of state-sponsored justice have failed individuals and communities. Robinson examines the film Sin miedo (2017), which was made by director Claudio Zulian in collaboration with the relatives of people who were disappeared during the internal armed conflict in Guatemala. The documentary responds to a recommendation made by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that was not fulfilled by the Guatemalan state. Robinson argues that Sin miedo’s use of testimonials and reconstructions defies a culture of enforced silence, converting the film into both action and memory.
Carosi analyzes the music video “Quilo” made by Afro-Colombian hip-hop duo DxD. The video is dedicated to the memory of Carlos Esteban Bravo, a twenty-year-old Black man who was murdered by the police in October 2020; the officers involved were never indicted. Carosi contrasts “Quilo” with news coverage of police violence towards Afro-Colombians. Paying particular attention to the video’s depiction of hairstyles, clothing, and posing, Carosi explores how the video’s aesthetics imagine an alternative future for Black communities. Carosi also shows how the clip’s use of temporality and spatiality evoke the non-specific time of Black grief.