“Consciousness of a Need”
The renowned Uruguayan filmmaker Mario Handler wrote the “Consciousness of a Need” manifesto as an open letter to Uruguay’s leftist magazine Marcha in 1970, and was written 3 years before the civic-military dictatorship took place in Uruguay (1973-85). The manifesto lays out the urgency that lies in developing the country’s first cinematic industry in response to the harsh political climate that Uruguayans were facing at the time. Previous to generating a movement of Third World Cinema, many Latin American filmmakers had been exposed to the literary and filmic technique of Italian Neorealism and were inspired to create their own countercinema. Much like Third Cinema, Italian Neorealism sought to represent poverty and everyday life in counter to the popular mainstream films, but some film scholars believed it lacked the impact of Third Cinema to use film as a tool to create social commentary. Because during the late half of the twentieth century many Latin American countries were under the control of oppressive regimes –which in its entire state was recognized as Operation Condor– revolutionary intellectuals took it into their own hands to depict their social reality in order to invoke global consciousness.