Abundance and Frustration

This article examines women’s participation in the Miners’ Film Workshop, a countereducation project developed in Bolivia in 1983 by the Trade Union Federation of Bolivian Mineworkers (FSTMB) and the French nongovernmental organization Association Varan. Drawing on feminist production studies, institutional ethnography, and critical fabulation, the article looks into the abundant archive of the Miners’ Film Workshop, preserved in the offices of what is now Ateliers Varan, to develop frustration as a key conceptual category in the understanding of the structural constraints and blockages that determined North–South cooperation for development projects and women’s involvement in these projects. Frustration also serves as a methodological tool used to shift the analysis away from an auteurist and film-centered historiography to focus on the social infrastructures and networks that sustained this project in a decade of militancy and NGO-ization of Latin American cinema.