The Western film genre is set in the American frontier and is commonly associated with folk tales of the Western United States, Northern Mexico, and Western Canada. For the 2024 NCLAFF, this genre moves south to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. The West arrived (as a colonial power) and stayed later in the form of the republican consolidation of modern Latin America in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

In many of this year’s selections, a sort of audiovisual “Wild West” with gender undertones reminds us how hostile spaces, sparsely populated, were (and still are) victims of hired gunslinger characters that came to pacify the Indigenous menace to development. Western narratives of progress are seen in many of the films as an attempt to tame territories rich in natural resources at the expense of the communities that inhabited them.