New Storytellers on Border Crossing to the U.S. (1995-2016)The Representation of Migration from Latin America in Today's Documentary Filmmaking

The current project focuses on today’s documentaries on migration from Latin America to the U.S..The research group intends to verify how recent documentaries represent migration and how they convey transcultural memory using specific aesthetic and narratological devices. Today’s documentaries not only portray a spatial and identitarian in-betweenness which transcends national, political, social, linguistic and cultural borders, but also further explore the frontiers between fact and fiction.Contrary to the more authoritative and expository mode of less recent documentaries, today’s documentaries progressively present a subjective interpretation of reality within an experimental storytelling, which comprises associative spatial juxtapositions and a varying temporality. This type of creative storytelling engages actively the audience, but also appeals to the documentarymaker her/himself emphasizing the reality of border crossers.The poetic-performative approach of today’s documentary filmmakers requires careful academic investigation.

Keywords:storytellers

Disciplines:Language studies, Literary studies