While all nations possess their own distinct spatial dynamics and discourses, Argentina is perhaps unique among Latin American countries for the enduring discursive binary of city and country that emerged from a foundational text by its seventh president, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Taking cues from James Fennimore Cooper (Sommer 1991: 52–82), Sarmiento’s political tract Facundo, which was published in 1845, often serves as ground zero for the spatial imaginary of Argentina. Sarmiento’s rural–urban dichotomy often is denoted in shorthand as civilización y barbarie – civilisation and barbarism – which encompasses the characterization of urban zones by Western European progress pitted against the rural pampas and, to paraphrase Sarmiento, its immense emptiness and peril owing to gauchos, indigenous savages, and other marauders not yet brought under the thumb of modernisation. While Sarmiento’s spatial binary historically extends its national cinema, critics of Argentine film over the past ten years have examined previously overlooked cinematic presentations of rural and urban confines from the past and, most significantly here, detected the emergence of national spaces that expand a narrow citycountry spatial imaginary to include depictions of villas, or unregulated slums, and countries, which is an Argentine term for a kind of gated community. In her study of architecture in post-1990s Argentine cinema, Amanda Holmes asserts, ‘Architecture has become a political signifier of contemporary socioeconomic conditions’ (2018: 2). Given that seven films since 2006 have been set, entirely or partially, in countries at a time when Argentina has been in the throes of neoliberal policy, the gated community becomes uniquely associated with Argentine film and, as a cinematic space, intimates some spatial transformations of Argentina.

The country has been imagined cinematically through the elastic templates of a multiplicity of genres, including comedies, dramas, art-house cinema, documentaries, and, most importantly here, crime films. And while I will allude to a range of Argentine films set in countries, I focus on two recent crime films in which gated communities figure prominently – Thursday Night Widows/ Las viudas de los jueves (Marcelo Piñeyro, 2009) and Betibú (Miguel Cohan, 2014). The two films and their adherence to select generic facets of crime cinema present an opportunity to examine the intertwining of cinematic narrativisations of neoliberalism in Argentina within the space of the gated community.