Coming to Latin America: Moving image encounters, non-Latin American practitioners

Latin America has long been a region marked by the arrival of foreign actors. Especially since the landing of Europeans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the whole continent has been in a constant process of redefining itself in assimilation or rejection of external influences while holding tight to what remains autochthonous. Cinema has not been an exception in this process of exchange. The arrival of the Lumière brothers—“another foreign import” from Europe (López 48)—is intimately connected to this history of external influences that have recursively shaped Latin American visual culture over many centuries.