Publication Title

Cultural Studies Review

Volume

17

Publication Date

2011

Document Type

Article

Issue

2

First and Last Page

257-270

Abstract

This article explores the hallucinations and the utopian desire in The Rose Seller (1998), a movie by the Colombian director Víctor Gaviria. On the one hand, the film shows the death of the street children of Medellín-Colombia and that the surrounding world of drugs is extremely violent; thus the audience can watch how these children live in very precarious conditions and how they are forced to face death on a daily basis. On the other hand, drugs lead these children to an imaginary space where they experience their affective world intensely. I suggest that this imaginary space constitute their utopian desire, which helps the children to make their world livable again and to remain alive. The importance of the utopian desire lies in how it makes the imagination of a different kind of collective experience possible and generates solidarity with those who live in dangerous and difficult conditions.

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