Observing the pink cloud from Greece and the Southern Cone: Crisis, critique and the promise of queer feminist cinema

Abstract

A series of entangled crisis-scapes have been unfolding in the past decade in Chile, Argentina and Brazil – geographies that have been central to discourses of and about the Global South. Ranging from presidential impeachment and military control to inflation and austerity, Chilean, Argentinian and Brazilian crisis-scapes have given rise to filmic expressions of queer feminist critique that challenge neo-liberal governmentality. This article focuses on indicative cinematic tendencies in these three countries, while taking into account the author’s positionality as a (Greek) researcher engaged in the anthropology of cinema and neo-liberalism. Swinging back and forth from Greece to the Southern Cone, the aim of the article is to extract what is affectively shared between seemingly disparate subjectivities and experiences of coping with the present of crises. One of the things shared is queer survivalism, as manifested in the short fiction films Apodrasi apo ton Efthrafsto Planiti (Escaping the Fragile Planet, 2020) by Thanasis Tsimpinis and Os últimos românticos do mundo (The Last Romantics of the World, 2020) by Henrique Arruda – both featuring a gay couple getting through their last day on Earth while a toxic pink cloud destroys the planet.