Abstract

Stephen Hart, Professor of Hispanic Studies at University College London, coined the phrase ‘slick grit’ in 2006 when he delivered a paper in London on the ‘dynamics of contemporary Latin American Cinemas’ as part of a symposium on the transnational in Latin American and Iberian cinemas. At that point, he was using the term as a means to unravel and articulate the reason for the phenomenal box office success of turn-of-millennium films such as Fernando Meirelles’s Cidade de Deus (City of God) and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch), which he argued had ‘opened up a dialogue’ with Hollywood to transform the face of Latin American films, resulting in worldwide critical acclaim and commercial success.