Elizabeth Andrea Ramirez Soto
2023-2024
François Chevalier Fellow
Elizabeth Ramírez Soto is a film and media historian, and her areas of research include transnational cinema, feminist film history and documentary. She is interested in the links between political violence, forced displacement, and transnational modes of production, focusing on Latin America. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at Fordham University, and previously held the same position at the San Francisco State University Film School.
Author of (Un)veiling Bodies: A Trajectory of Chilean Post-Dictatorship Documentary (2019) and co-editor of Nomadías: El cine de Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento y Angelina Vázquez (2016). She has published in journals such as Film Quarterly, Feminist Media Histories and Jump Cut, and in multiple essay collections. Her project on experimental transnational television received a prestigious grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the USA. She is co-founder of RAMA, Research Network for Audiovisual Research by Women in Latin America. She received her PhD in Film and Television Studies from the University of Warwick in England.
Projet de recherche
This project analyses films made by Latin American filmmakers for European television between the 1970s and 1990s. At that time, the confluence of initiatives from ZDF in West Germany, INA in France, Channel Four in England and later, TVE in Spain, created a vibrant cultural space in which public television favoured experimentation and transnational modes of film production.
These institutions had departments that promoted the exploration of the expressive and political potential of the television medium and hosted European and foreign filmmakers, while trying to survive the process of deregulation and privatisation. This period coincided with the arrival in Europe of numerous Latin American filmmakers fleeing dictatorships in the region, who turned to these television departments for support in making their films. Latin American filmmakers found important allies in these departments, although their collaborations were not without tensions. This project examines the characteristics of these transnational exchanges.
Sélection de publications
- December 2023 (forthcoming). “From the Third World to the Global South: Channel 4 and the South series (1991–93)”, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.
- 2022. “Why didn’t you write to me? On Friendship, Exile, and Transnational Collaboration”, in Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg (eds), Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, Berlin, MIT/Haus der Kulturen der Welt, pp. 267-285.
- 2021. “The Double Day of Valeria Sarmiento: Exile, Mobility and Cinema’s Gendered Division of Labor”, Feminist Media Histories, 7:3, pp. 154-177.
- 2019. (Un)veiling Bodies: A Trajectory of Chilean Post-Dictatorship Documentary, Cambridge, Legenda.
