Identifies and analyzes the emergence of a new genre of hybrid, poetic films in Latin American cinema.

Poetic Cinema highlights a new trend in Latin American cinema--the rise of hybrid poetic documentaries that emphasize aesthetic, visual, and sonic experimentation and blur the distinction between documentaries and art films or auteur cinema. To illuminate this trend, Cynthia M. Tompkins juxtaposes a series of documentaries and art films produced in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, and El Salvador between 2007 and 2021. Weaving together detailed formal analysis and a wide range of film theory, Tompkins draws out their shared poetic features as well as their similarities with French poetic realism, Italian neorealism, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Cinema of Poetry, the global movement of slow and minimalist cinema, and other traditions. Latin American films often blend documentary and fiction in their portrayal of social and political issues. Poetic Cinema shows that today's hybridity goes further, rendering poetic documentaries nearly indistinguishable from art cinema in ways that reflect the heterogeneous origins of film in the region and worldwide.