Introduction

In this monograph, I have thus far illuminated the rich dialogism of child-starred cinemas in Spain. The final chapter will broaden this study's geographic scope to provide an overview of the dialogism and aesthetics of bildungsfilms across the Atlantic in the 2000s. Latin American cinema, with films hailing from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, has enjoyed its own bumper crop of approximately fourteen child-starred bildungsfilms over eleven years. The bildungsfilms, defined as ‘películas de aprendizaje o formación con protagonistas que son niños’ (Deveny 2012: 397) (coming-of-age films with child protagonists), that I will examine here link sexual and political awakening at the time of military or paramilitary coups in Spain, Chile, and Argentina. Compared with other subgenres of the nuevo cine con niño enumerated in the monograph's introduction, the bildungsfilm is the variant that most closely resembles the definition of cinema of ‘childhood’ in the Diccionario temático del cine:

[[I]t contrasts with more realistic, imaginative or critical portrayals of the phase of childhood and stories of the nostalgia of the lost paradise of childhood, recollections filtered by memory, surprising (happy or traumatic), processes of learning and dis-covery of the world, etc. Obviously, in many of them it is the cognitive point of view of the child – more or less credible – that which grants the story a hybrid character, very capable of combining tragedy with the naïf gaze, story-telling of daily realities with distortion of the facts.]

The motifs of the lost paradise of childhood beside gained knowledge of the adult world pervade the bildungsfilms at the heart of this chapter. With attention to national acculturations, I will pair select Spanish and Latin American films to reveal common political use, motifs, and aesthetics of cinematic childhood across national cinemas.