Zaira Zarza Blanco

2026-2027

François Chevalier

Université de Montréal

The Diaspora Revolution: Cuban Cinemas in the New Millennium

Zaira Zarza is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at Université de Montréal/Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang. Her research interests include the cinemas of the diaspora and the economies of film and media in Latin America and the Caribbean. As a programmer, she has worked at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and the Cartagena International Film Festival (FICCI). She also directed one edition of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Film Festival. Zarza co-edited the volume Diffracting the North: Contemporary Latinx Canadian Experiences and Practices in Film, New Media, and Visual Arts (Concordia University Press) in 2025, published the book Caminos del cine brasileño contemporáneo (Ediciones ICAIC) in 2010, and co-curated the exhibition L’espace de plateformes (Carrefour des arts et de sciences, UdeM, 2023-2024). Her academic writing has also appeared in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Théorème, Intermédialités, and Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas. Her second monograph, The Diaspora Revolution: Cuban Cinemas in the New Millennium, is under contract with the University of Florida Press.

"The Diaspora Revolution: Cuban Cinemas in the New Millennium" is the first monograph devoted to Cuban diasporic cinema. Drawing on over a decade of scholarship, archival research, and curatorial work, it offers a portrait of contemporary diasporic film production by Cubans and develops frameworks to analyze it. The book explores the compounded marginalization of these films and filmmakers in both the homeland and host societies as they navigate national and transnational structures. It foregrounds mobility, identity, and affect to study how diaspora transforms cinema, and to show how filmmakers reimagine diverse genres, including autobiographical and participatory forms. Through textual analysis, interviews, and autoethnography, the chapters examine migration documentaries, smartphone practices, archival films, transnational production, and return migration, revealing the inventive strategies
Cuban diasporic filmmakers use to negotiate belonging, memory, ethics, and sociocultural ties.

Diffracting the North: Contemporary Latinx-Canadian Experiences and Practices in Film, New Media, and Visual Arts, ed. Concordia University Press, 2025. (With Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda and Analays Álvarez Hernández). 

"Contemporary Latinx-Canadian and Latinx-Québecois Cinemas: A Diasporic Gaze." Canadian Journal of Film and Media Studies 34.1 (2025): 123-147.

"Que se vayan ellos: Beyond Resilience in Puerto Rican Social Justice Documentary." In Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century, edited by Moradiyan Rizi Najmeh and Shilyh Warren, 151-168. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025.

“Empowered Auralities: Memory, Disability and Space in Mafifa (Daniela Muñoz Barroso 2021).” In Female Agency in Films by Latin American Women Directors, edited by Maria Helena Rueda and Vania Barraza, 51-72. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

"Twenty-first-century Film and Filmmakers of the Cuban Diaspora." In The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature, edited by Vicky Unruh and Jacqueline Loss, 656-672. Cambridge University Press, 2024. (With Dunja Fehimovic).

"The Disappearing Landscape: Narratives of Displacement in Two Venezuelan Ecofeminist Documentaries." In Rediscovering Cinematic Landscape and Visualizing Emerging Identities in 21st Century Latin American Cinema, edited by María Soledad Paz-MacKay and Argelia González Hurtado,
113-130. Lexington Books Press, 2024.

"Practices and Environments of Collective Sleep in Twenty-First-Century Latin American Film." Intermédialités 4.1 (2023): 1-21.

"‘I Want to Watch Movies': Film Activism and Cuban Screens." Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas 17.3 (2020): 383–395.