Reality Effects brings together the reflections of leading film scholars and critics from Latin America, the UK and the United States on the re-emergence of the real as a prime concern in contemporary Argentine and Brazilian film, and as a main reason for the acclaim both cinematographies have won among international audiences in recent years.

1. Cámera lúcida; José Carlos Avellar 2. Footprints: Risks and Achievements in New Argentine Cinema David Oubiña PART I: RETURNS OF THE REAL: RE-ENACTMENT, MEMORY, AND THE UNCANNY 3. Documentary Cinema and the Return of Past Events; Andréa França 4. Re-Enactment and Transmission in Contemporary Cinema; Ivone Margulies 5. The Return of the Natural: Landscape, Nature and the Place of Fiction; Edgardo Dieleke 6. Beyond Reflexivity: Acting and Experience in León, Rejtman and Coutinho; Joanna Page 7. The Scene and the Inscription of the Real; César Guimarães PART II: ARCHIVES OF THE PRESENT 8. Global Periphery; Ivana Bentes 9. Exploding Buses: José Padilha and the Hijacking of Media; Tom Cohen 10. December's Other Scene: New Argentine Cinema and the Crisis of 2001; Jens Andermann 11. Archival Images - Memories of Labor: Citation, Recycling and Appropriation in Contemporary Argentine Cinema; Mariano Mestman 12. In Praise of Difficulty: Notes on Realism and Narrative in Contemporary Argentine Film; Domin Choi 13. The I as Other: the Real, the Archive and the Witness; Álvaro Fernández Bravo 14. The Documentary Between the First and the Third PersonL; Gonzalo Aguilar