Quipu and The Truth Commission project: Two transmedia and interactive documentaries that collect concepts from the political cinema of the 60s and 70s in Latin America

Abstract

The ways of developing Latin American documentary film proposals have been transformed over the years from the original perspective in Latin America of the political cinema of the 60s and 70s. Imperfect Cinema, by Cuban García Espinosa; the aesthetics of violence and hunger, by the Brazilian Glauber Rocha; or the third Argentine cinema, promoted by Fernando Birri, were some of the guarantors of Latin American cinema that have become a critical and reflective bastion of their communities in the 21st century. Despite this, in the political sphere in most of the current films it is not the main thing, a more cultural, experiential and aesthetic cinema has replaced it.

However, the political elements presented in the documentary film discourse of the 1960s and 1970s never disappeared, they were only transformed based on the needs of each country's context. And it has been possible, with projects related to new media, to develop in an innovative way the perspective presented in the political cinema of the 20th century. This text presents two proposals of the way in which this cinema has established itself in the new documentary and later, thanks to new technologies, in the interactive documentary of the 21st century, being the new ways of consolidating this political cinema. As a case study, reference is made to the interactive documentary proposal Quipu (2015), which refers to the facts occurred in relation to forced sterilizations in the '90s in Peru, and the recent transmedia of the report of The Truth Commission (2022) in Colombia, showing critical elements and related to proposals made by its own people in context, characteristic of Latin American political cinema of the twentieth century in its development and, therefore, recognizing the evolution of the documentary of this type in Latin America.