Latineos - Latin America, Caribbean, arts, culture

CARLA GUELFENBEIN was born in Santiago, Chile, and lived in England for 11 years, where she took degrees at the University of Essex and Central St Martin's. Returning to Chile, she worked as Art  and Fashion Director for the magazine Elle, until she decided to become a full-time novelist.

Pablo Larrain is a Chilean film director and a leading light in cinema d’auteur, a movement characterized by the director’s personal vision suffusing his cinematic output, making it instantly recognizable as the product of one particular director or producer.  Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski are familiar examples of this, and nowadays Larrain has emerged in Latin American cinema as an exponent of a unique style that incorporates an idiosyncratic sense of dark humour that seduces audiences with its mix of humour and chilling undertones.

As the dust settles on ‘Camp Hope’, I am drawn back to those hours when the rescue was reaching its final stages, and to the news coverage which, like over a billion others, I watched hoping for the best. A closer look at the way in which this world event was represented, and the implications of this representation, makes for some unsettlingly revealing (re)viewing.

This Chilean poet, and diplomat, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. His original name was Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, but he used the pen name Pablo Neruda for over 20 years before adopting it legally in 1946. Neruda is the most widely read of the Spanish American poets. From the 1940s on, his works reflected the political struggle of the left and the socio-historical developments in South America. He also wrote love poems.