Migrant Women’s Documentary Filmmaking: Shifting Positionalities and Precarious Creativity Across Borders in the Experience of Five Latin American Directors

This chapter investigates the materialities of transnational filmmaking and the shifting boundaries of gender, mobility, and subjectivity in migrant cinema. By means of semi-structured interviews, it analyses the work of five Latin American women directors (Josephine Landertinger Forero, Patricia Perez Fernandez, Andrea Said Camargo, Nora Salgado, and Mariana Viñoles) who have made documentaries on international migration in the past ten years. Their films are examples of ‘cinema of Me’, in which the migrant filmmaker is ‘both the subject matter of the film and the subject making the film’ (Lebow, 2012): this intimate and affective way of representing transnational mobility translates in an ‘epistemology of the border’ (Mignolo, 2011) in which multiple levels of subjectivity and (self)representation overlap. Indeed, also the professional trajectory of these filmmakers is marked by a form of ‘precarious creativity’ (Curtin and Sanson, 2016), which relies on the director's ability to work with low budgets, while negotiating transnational mobility, and work flexibility. As a result, the chapter discusses the intersection between the films and the cross-border experiences of these migrant practitioners, looking at the porous boundaries between creativity, labour, and subjectivity in a gendered and mobile production context.