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The final chapter examines teacher films, those movies in which a (typically) suburban white woman accepts a job teaching student of color in low-income urban neighborhoods. Although the late 1980s and 1990s certainly do not mark the first instances of teachers as protagonists in American cinema, it was during these years that films centered around white teachers and their inner-city nonwhite pupils became increasingly popular and developed specific themes and tropes that were inherently informed by the logic of colorblindness. This analysis of this genre is situated, most notably the 1995 film Dangerous Minds, within the context of the War on Drugs, urban blight, the dismantling of affirmative action, and, most importantly, neoliberal educational reform in arguing that colorblindness ultimately produced entirely new film genres that are inherently colorblind.

The chapter explores connections among postsocialism, neoliberal capitalism, and shamanism. The author traces the multiple contexts behind current misfortunes by revealing the cumulative repercussions of the socioeconomic procedures that have been implemented as modernization projects in Mongolia since the advent of socialism in 1921. These include, during socialism, forced collectivization and semi-sedentarization of nomads, and the neoliberal reforms that were pushed by the international community after socialism. The chaos and corruption of privatization in particular, with the inheritance of risks and liabilities that Verdery has noted, led to economic devastation and inequality. The author argues that while these external processes and projects constitute sources of misfortune, they have also transformed the local world itself into an additional source that generates more calamity. The author uses the concept of genealogy to highlight the ways in which shamanic epistemology explains misfortunes not as individual mistakes or karma, but as intimately linked with the life-events of ancestors in longue durée, as part of larger historical processes. At the same time, in everyday life, shamanic competition together with gossip, mistrust, and the assumption of ill-intention by others tend to undo the Buryats’ efforts to deal with misfortune, and in fact exacerbate it.

This introductory section and its account of the significant changes in Argentine filmmaking in the last twenty five years acts as a platform to the director-centred analyses of Juan José Campanella’s films in Chapter 6. It situates Campanella and his filmmaking practice as typical of one vector of Argentina’s changed filmmaking landscape (the ‘industry auteurs’ produced through the neoliberal reforms to the industry in the 1990s and fostered by transnational media conglomerates) but also addresses the vibrant independent filmmaking movement (the New Argentine Cinema) also a by- product of the 1990s reforms and fostered by the government and transnational funding bodies.