Exploring narratives and identities in post-Cold War transformation: the poetics of land in contemporary cinema

Abstract

The article discusses how individuals' displacements and interaction with the land are represented in Brazilian cinema based on ten films selected from 1980 to the second decade of the 2000s. The text initially explores the concept of the expulsion of Saskia Sassen, who discusses the crisis generated by an economy based on globalization and unbridled capitalism post-1980, worsening social and environmental inequalities. It also analyzes a work by Edward Said as an exiled intellectual who lives the experience of displacement based on identities within a critical bias of his own culture and the culture of others. Cinema, as art, explores such experiences by constructing displaced characters who experience migration motivated by the desire for better opportunities or survival. The chosen films illustrate, in some way, the questions raised by the sociologist Sassen, contributing to raising awareness about the issues surrounding displacement.