The purpose of this chapter is to map out new ways to think about contemporary Latin American cinema that take us beyond both the traditional close reading of national films within national contexts, and the dismissive notions of new trends in co-production as signifying nothing more than commercially driven expressions of global capital in movement. First I explore the transnational cultural links between Spain, Portugal and Latin America, the historical and cultural basis for these links, and the extent to which such links are affecting notions of ‘the national’ within Latin American film production. The second part of the chapter then focuses on two Brazilian co-productions, Ruy Guerra's Estorvo (Turbulence, 2000) and Henrique Goldman's Jean-Charles (2009), by way of providing a case study of filmmaking from a national industry that tends to be read as somehow set apart from filmmaking in other regions of the Hispanic world.

What do we mean by Hispanic and Latin American?

I take as my starting point an interrogation of the meanings of loaded terms such as ‘Hispanic’ and even ‘Latin American’, in the light of recent shifts in economic and cultural relations between Spain, Portugal and their American former colonies, and in the context of ongoing debates on the meaning of such terms among, for example, the influential Latino community of the USA. Part of the difficulty in discussing their meanings stems from the fact that the terminology shifts, depending on one's location (the UK, the USA, Spain, Portugal or Latin America) and on one's locus of enunciation.