Lights, camera, revival

Is Latin American cinema finally beginning to prosper? It depends on whom you ask.

By Paul Constance

Amores Perros did what Latin American movies presumably never do. It impressed the critics, enthralled audiences, and made a decent profit.

A first feature by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, the gritty urban drama racked up prizes and critical accolades from the moment it began showing at international film festivals in early 2000. González Iñárritu was profiled in The New York Times Magazine, feted in Hollywood, and–after Amores Perros was nominated for an Oscar–hailed as the harbinger of a new kind of Latin American cinema.

Most importantly, he was able to secure a distributor in the lucrative U. S. theater market. At its peak in May 2001, Amores Perros was being shown on 187 U.S. screens. That is a small fraction of the 3,000-plus screens that a major Hollywood release can command, but pretty good for a subtitled "art" film. When Amores Perros concluded its U.S. theater run in July, it had grossed around $5 million–more than twice what it cost to make. Counting revenues from other countries, Amores Perros was a solid financial success. González Iñárritu is now represented by a mayor Hollywood talent agency and is at work on another film.

Ignacio Durán Loera.

Unfortunately, his experience is anything but typical. In the last 20 years only a handful of Latin American films have enjoyed financial success on a comparable scale (the 1992 Mexican romance Like Water for Chocolate, and the 1998 Brazilian drama Central Station are other notable exceptions to the rule). Most Latin American films never find an international distributor, and few even generate enough revenue from home-country screenings to break even.

Earlier this year two directors, an actor, and a film producer offered personal reflections on this sad reality during a roundtable discussion on Film Production and Marketing in Latin America organized by the IDB’s Cultural Center at the Bank’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. The fate of Amores Perros served as a rueful reference point for several remarks.

"In order for Amores Perros to be well received in Mexico it first had to win all kinds of international prizes," said Osvaldo Benavides, a young Mexican television and film actor. "We have an unfortunate tradition of denigrating national films."

Ignacio Durán Loera, who directed the Mexican Film Institute in the early 1990s, said such attitudes are reinforced by the crushing dominance of Hollywood movies in Latin American theaters. "Around 98 percent of the screens in Mexico are occupied by Hollywood films" at any given moment, he said.

With their dazzling special effects, superstar casts and huge marketing budgets, Hollywood films have an insurmountable competitive advantage over their Latin American counterparts. Durán pointed out that Amores Perros, which cost around $2 million to make, was considered a big-ticket project in Mexico, where the average production budget is between $1 million and $1.5 million. Yet even third-rate Hollywood films have budgets 10 times that amount.

Isabel Gardela.

Old obstacles. None of this is new. Production costs, distribution problems and Hollywood competition have been the bane of the Latin American film industry since its inception. "We are always talking about crisis," said Durán.

The crisis is not exclusively Latin American. At the IDB roundtable Isabel Gardela, a 36-year-old Spanish director (Two for Tea, 2000), said the scarcity of production funding is a constant source of frustration, despite her country’s relatively robust film output. "Producers and directors are always fighting about money," she said. Each of the three feature films she has produced so far have relied entirely on government financing, and she said her career would never have gotten off the ground without such subsidies.

Eliseo Subiela, the veteran Argentine director (Man Facing Southeast, 1986, and eight other features), said government support is necessary for esthetic and cultural reasons as well. Given the dominance of Hollywood, "it is not possible to develop a national cinema without government support," he argued. When it comes to ensuring the survival of a national film tradition, "I don’t believe in free markets," he said.

But Subiela also acknowledged the risk of heavy state involvement in film production. At worst, he said, this can lead to a "domesticated" industry that loses touch with popular tastes and never learns how to succeed commercially.

Government support for national film industries has at times been substantial in some Latin American countries. During the 1950s, for example, generous subsidies in Mexico made it possible for local studios to produce as many as 150 movies per year. For a time, the Mexican film industry even succeeded in maintaining distribution networks in many other Latin American countries. But as spending priorities shifted, the subsidies gradually dried up, leading to a widely lamented decline in Mexican cinema. A similar phenomenon took place in Argentina, though on a more modest scale.

Eliseo Subiela.

Revival time? The speakers at the IDB seminar were not entirely pessimistic, however. Mexico’s Durán said that in recent years private companies have begun to invest in national film projects, providing a much-needed complement to government funding. The long-standing practice of joint ventures or co-productions with European or other Latin American firms is also on the rise, providing financing for up to 80 percent of Mexican movies, according to Durán. Thanks partly to these developments and to renewed government efforts to support the industry, some 27 films were released in Mexico in 2000–three times as many as in 1990.

Argentina’s Subiela expressed hope that digital video technology will create some financial breathing room for the industry by enabling directors to produce film-quality images for a small fraction of the cost. "I made Las Aventuras de Dios (2000) on digital video because otherwise I could not have afforded to make it," he said. The film’s $200,000 budget was the lowest of his career, and yet the results satisfied his goals. "I’ve seen students use digital video to make full-length features for less than $1,000," he said.

With their vast reserves of energy, creativity and optimism, film students may be the Latin American film industry’s most valuable asset. Subiela, who runs a private film school in Buenos Aires, estimates that there are 5,000 film students in his country alone–one of the highest enrollment levels he has ever seen. Most of these students are steeped in the world of digital media and the Internet, and they bring an entirely new sensibility to the world of film. Subiela said he believes his students will find ways of producing and distributing their work that would have been inconceivable to his generation.

Paradoxically, young Latin Americans may also show a greater appetite for home-brewed movies than their parents did. In a recent essay in Foreign Policy magazine, Chilean novelist Alberto Fuguet described a visit to a 15-screen multiplex theater in an upscale Santiago shopping mall earlier this year. Expecting the usual array of Hollywood blockbusters, Fuguet was amazed to see that 5 screens were devoted to films from Chile, Mexico, Ecuador and Peru–and that these films were obviously well attended. Fuguet ultimately chose to see a U.S. film, What You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her, that was the first feature by Colombian director Rodrigo García, son of Gabriel García Márquez.

Fuguet used this anecdote as a starting point for an essay on a rising generation of Latin American artists who are overturning traditional assumptions about the cultural antagonism between the United States and its southern neighbors. Having come of age in the 1990s, a time of unprecedented cultural commerce between North and South, these artists enthusiastically borrow from the esthetic and narrative conventions of Hollywood, even as they dissect and revitalize their own creative traditions. Amores Perros, in which the jarring reality of life in Mexico City is presented in a manner reminiscent of celebrated Hollywood films such as Pulp Fiction and American Beauty, is a perfect example of this new trend. With a little luck, movies like Amores Perros could end up finding as big an audience at home as they do abroad.

Date posted: December, 2001