Diestro-Dópido, Mar (2017) The Film Festival Circuit. In: A Companian to Latin American Cinema. Wiley Blackwell, London, pp. 99-113. ISBN 9781118552889

Abstract

In this chapter I survey the origins of film festivals in Latin America and the Caribbean, which have too rarely been the focus of academic study, particularly in the English language, situating them in their respective historical contexts (national and otherwise) and exploring their relationship with the international film industry. I will examine the role that the international festival circuit has played in promoting a certain kind of Latin American cinema through the discovery and promotion of “New Waves,” especially during the late 1960s and 1970s when a more politicized cinema flourished in Latin America. More pertinently, I will look at the influence that this international attention has had on Latin American film festivals’ own involvement in nation building, and their extolling of a politically and culturally utopian image of the continent through cinema, which in turn will bring into focus the problematic notion of a unified Latin American cinema.