Cultural Recognitions and Nostalgic Evocations: The Cinematic Experience of Costumbrist Films

What is it about?

This article takes a look at the cinematic experience of costumbrist cinema. The term costumbrism refers to films paying special attention to the representation of customs and cultural idiosyncrasies of a group of people, working as an added layer to the story events. The text discusses different modes of audience filmic identification based on the degree of recognition of the culture-laden mises en scène and overall production design of the film. The evocative and nostalgic dimension of these films is considered from a film phenomenological perspective. Similarly, the potential functionalities of the costumbrist stylistic approach to filmmaking are traced by analysing several case studies: Volver (Pedro Almodóvar, 2006), A Separation (Farhadi, 2011), Still Walking (Kore-eda, 2008) and Happy as Lazzaro (Rohrwacher, 2018).

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