Funding Source: Huntington Fund and Wellesley College – Argentine women filmmakers have made significant contributions to the film industry since the mid-1990s. Despite the fortified and professionalized bond between women and cinema in Argentina, academic research still continues to be patchy. This project fills in parts of such lacunae, as it draws more nuanced attention to the place of affect in the films of Argentina’s most prominent, prolific, and internationally reputable women directors—that is, Albertina Carri, Lucrecia Martel, and Lucía Puenzo. Several questions drive my analyses forward regarding the distinct explorations of affective manifestations in these directors’ films: How does affect shape the meaning of these particular films or endow certain moments in them with socio-cultural significance? What kind of aesthetic newness do these filmmakers generate at the core of and beyond the New Argentine Cinema by distinctly privileging affect over basic emotions? What can concentrated manifestations of affect reveal aesthetically about these films’ sociopolitical commitments? Upon answering these (and other) questions, my project ultimately centers on the subtle tensions between affect and emotions as terrains of sociopolitical significance in these directors’ feature-length films. Such tensions significantly relate to their films’ core arguments, signaling the directors’ novel insights into complex manifestations of memory (individual, social, and historical), desire (incestuous, homoerotic, and inter-generational), and violence (political, emotional, and sexual).