Children on the Threshold in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

This is a highly accomplished book that makes a significant contribution to the field. Randall draws together in new and fruitful ways an impressive range of theories and approaches relating to the representation of the child in cinema. Her readings of the films are superbly nuanced and insightful. -- Joanna Page, University of Cambridge
In this skillful study of the representations and potential meanings of child figures and childhood in a fascinating range of contemporary films from Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, Rachel Randall provides extensive contextualisation (socio-historical, psychoanalytic, and theoretical) of the situations in which they were produced, as well as incisive and revealing analyses. She explores the ways in which these films, which range from conventional narratives to more experimental works and documentaries, portray children’s subjectivity and how the child characters’ status ‘on the threshold’ between nature and culture, innocence and knowledge, immaturity and maturity, comes to symbolize so much more. -- Claire Williams, University of Oxford
The corpus of films is geographically and generically diverse (including both fiction films and documentaries), and explores cinematic children from a variety of social, geographic and economic milieus; the theoretical frameworks are well chosen, solidly contextualized and smoothly integrated, as is relevant material on the social and political history of the countries in question. This is a clear and cogent book that makes a crucial contribution to the field, foregrounding questions of ethics and agency without eliding the child's difference from the adult as cinematic subject and scholarly object. -- Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas