Prácticas de (r)existencia. Los cuerpos infantiles en el cine latinoamericano (2006-2021)

This study examines the operational modes of the child’s body in Latin American cinema narratives during the first two decades of the 21st century. It considers how the body becomes an expressive vector within the filmic dispositif, where playing at being others enables one to become oneself. Using a qualitative and hermeneutic approach applied to 15 films, the study identifies three modes through which children’s bodies operate in conflict-laden contexts: conciliation, resistance, and symbolic escape. The analysis observes masked, camouflaged, and spectral bodies that embody an aesthetic dissidence subverting adult and institutional order, transforming cultural patterns of coercion through practices of (r)existence articulated to play, understood as a space of creation and insubordination. This dynamizes the relationship between body, power, and freedom, producing an ethics of persistence: the filmed children’s bodies do not merely resist, they (r)exist, inventing new ways of being in the world.