Filmmaking in Central America: An overview

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Central American audio-visual production has increased in an unprecedented manner. In the 1990s, the entire region only produced and exhibited one feature-length film, El silencio de Neto/Neto’s Silence (Argueta, 1994), yet in the last seventeen years more than two hundred fiction films have been made and shown in Central America. It is only in the last few years, however, that some of these films have attracted international interest in the form of funding and distribution or have created their own structures for these. This article therefore seeks to answer the question of how and why Central American film industries have been revived since 2000, considering the differing approaches to production and distribution employed by regional organizations, national governments and individual directors.