María Victoria Menis’s María y El Araña

Middle-class children and adolescents have been represented in several Argentine films of the twenty-first century. In María y El Araña [ María and Spiderman ] (2013), María Victoria Menis tackles the representation of youth who are at risk due to both their working-class backgrounds and the absence or incapacity of any parental figures. Her film also engages with the difficult topics of adolescent sexualization, sexual abuse, and physical violence perpetrated against disadvantaged youth. While the cinematic depiction of destitution, also known as ‘poverty porn’, generally deploys realism, I argue that Menis avoids the dangers of the paedophilic gaze in María y El Araña , by briefly providing the point of view of the young female protagonist, as well as a glimpse into one of her dreams. The director also relies on fairy tales to narrate this story about the dangers of adult violence against vulnerable adolescents to educate viewers about these abuses and their threat to civilized society. Because fairy tales offer access to imaginative worlds, despite the film’s themes, María y El Araña has an unusual ending for a Latin American film featuring at-risk young protagonists.