Hard yards, vulnerable bodies: Tenderness in two recent prison films from Argentina and Chile

Abstract

Prison literature from Latin America has been a topic of growing interest for literary scholars of and from the region in recent years. This reflects wider attention in cultural studies dedicated to ‘heterotopias’ or ‘other spaces’, while building on the work of sociologists who have studied prisons and prison reform in countries there. Less has been written, however, about films set in penitentiaries. Building on recent work (Podalksy) that examines the depiction of feelings and emotions in cinema, as well as writing on depictions of the Latin American jail on page and screen (Whitfield, Aguilar) this article addresses the cinematic portrayal of a perhaps unlikely feeling, tenderness, in two prison films from the Southern Cone, one fictional, El Príncipe (Sebastián Muñoz, Chile, 2019), and one documentary, Rancho (Pedro Speroni, Argentina, 2021). In both films, feelings traverse the body–mind divide and cross between people, while portrayed with what we shall argue is a form of filmic tenderness.