From the sinister to the marvelous

Youth narratives in times of negligence. Community Cinema Practice in La Matanza district, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2012-2024

Abstract

In 2012, the Community Cinema Practice (PCC) emerged in the district of La Matanza, Buenos Aires province, aiming to establish itself as a strategy for addressing mental health within the framework of the State. In 2021, the Youth Audiovisual Production Company “Bardo del Bueno” was created as a new approach that allowed more local actors to join. The Community Cinema Practice is rooted in the conceptual framework of Latin American Social Psychology, promoting and preventing community mental health through community audiovisual communication. With a community cinema workshop structure, it seeks to teach the use of audiovisual tools and foster a sense of group work focused on a shared task. In a commodified society, which often correlates with the medicalization of everyday life, the community cinema practice promotes subjective practices that recover feeling, thinking, and doing from the perspective of individuals experiencing challenges, situated in “being-becoming.” Thus, the challenge lies in generating and producing health-related content that establishes alternative, de-pathologized narratives created by the protagonists themselves. This approach aims to foster health processes that question myths, encouraging the planning of public policy actions in Buenos Aires province. The PCC has demonstrated how young people from La Matanza navigate the transition from the "sinister to the marvelous," embracing tenderness and dignity while creating processes of transformation and active adaptation to reality in contexts of neglect.