In many analyses of contemporary Latin American Cinema, the nation remains the principle site for both the production and reception of films. The use of the term transnational, and the study of films that overtly reflect the multiple processes of transnational filmmaking –engaging with popular (Hollywood) genre templates, receiving script development support from US-based institutions or partially US-owned companies, whole or partial funding from transnational or multinational companies, innovative marketing campaigns funded by US-based global distribution networks and global distribution through these same networks – is perceived to go against the broader and historical project of the region's national cinemas: to be culturally and economically resistant to Hollywood cinema and hegemony. This has resulted in the privileging of a, more easily theorised as national, art house model of filmmaking, the denigration or devaluing of commercial or popular filmmaking, and (in some cases) a lack of attention paid to the deterritorialised films made by Latin American directors outside the region.

What this book has attempted in its reading of the local and deterritorialised films of six transnational Latin American auteurs – Iñárritu, Cuarón, del Toro, Meirelles, Salles and Campanella – is a rethinking of the relationship between Hollywood, popular cinema and contemporary Latin America cinema, other than that of (resistance to) US cultural hegemony (Alvaray 2008; Thanouli 2008: 5). It has suggested that, rather than be ‘effaced’ when they work within mainstream, semi-independent or independent US infrastructure, models or genres, these directors (and often their Latin American core creative teams) function as ‘interstitial auteurs’ negotiating between their own national and in some cases continental cultures and authorial vision and that of an always diverse and diversifying Hollywood (Naficy 1996: 119). Hence the transnational films of these Latin American auteurs challenge what some critics perceive as the easy appropriation of Western models and reveal instead a model of dynamic ‘cinematic exchange’ (Newman 2010: 4). Through comparative approaches that prioritise industrial, auteurist, director-centred and genre analyses this book has developed ways of reading these directors’ local and deterritorialised films alongside each other to reveal how they share many of the same visual, stylistic and narrative strategies and a marked ideological coherence. It has also emphasised the role independent or semi-independent financing structures have played in the production of these directors’ films and as a source of support/oppositional aesthetics.