‘Intimacy and Distance' - domestic servants in Latin American women’s cinema: La mujer sin cabeza and El niño pez

The chapter begins by setting the contextual framework through a discussion of domestic service in Latin America from a sociological perspective in order to examine the specific circumstances in Latin America that the films are responding to. This will be followed by what I argue is a new thematic genre of filmmaking, Latin American films featuring maids, and I discuss recent films that fit within this genre and consider the ways in which new social, aesthetic and political visions are emerging with the films’ explorations of the class-riven private spaces of the home. The overview of films will be provided, as this is a little-studied, yet increasingly significant, area of film production that reconstitutes the key focus points for a new cultural politics. I then anlayse two complementary yet distinct visions of the relationship between servants and employers: Lucía Martel’s pessimistic realist La mujer sin cabeza/The Headless Woman (2008) and Lucía Puenzo’s utopian queer El niño pez/The Fish Child (2009).