O cinema latino‑americano diante da questão urbana: representações da favela no documentarismo dos anos 1950

The article discusses how Latin American documentary cinema, during the early movements of Modern Cinema, addressed urban issues and the processes of city development. It analyzes two short films: the Chilean Las Callampas (Rafael Sánchez, 1958) and the Argentine Buenos Aires (David José Kohon, 1958). The article explores how these films depicted urban transformations driven by Latin American modernization and migration, highlighting the cultural and political specificities of each national context. Las Callampas focuses on the role of the Catholic Church in the social struggle for housing, reflecting the influence of Christian Humanism in Chile. Buenos Aires employs an avant-garde-inspired aesthetic to portray a city divided in two - the center and the villa miseria - revealing an intrinsically contradictory urban process. Also, the article investigates why Brazilian documentaries from the equivalent period show no systematic interest in urban themes, at least until 1964.