Aldo Francia and Italian neorealism: A Latin American filmmaker and a creative affiliation

This article first analyses how and why Italian neorealism was a catalyst for the emergence of other national cinemas in Latin America. It also delves into the case of the creation of a new cinematographic culture in Chile, where the filmmaker Aldo Francia served as one of its main promoters and for whom neorealist cinema was a preponderantly important reference. Subsequently, the article examines the complex relationship that Francia established with neorealism in his work. In this sense, one of his films, Valparaíso, mi amor (Valparaiso My Love) (1969) is analysed and put into dialogue with other neorealist films, to determine the intertextual relationships that the film establishes with neorealist cinema, and thus, to delimit what is the neorealist heritage in the film, and, to understand how he radicalized and appropriated a foreign aesthetic to create his own aesthetic proposal based on Chilean context.