ARGENTINA
Argentina produced one of the first female directors in South America. María Luisa Bemberg was born in 1922 into a wealthy Argentine family (her grandfather founded Quilmes Brewery). She soon realized that writing scripts for others was frustrating and started to film. Camila (1984), the tragic tale of a socialite and a Jesuit priest who fall in love and elope in 1847 during the tyrannical rule of Governor Juan Manuel de Rosas, was nominated for an Oscar. Her 1986 film 'Miss Mary' starred Julie Christie, one of the hottest Hollywood actors at the time. She was also involved in founding the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, one of the world's most prestigious, and the very important Feminist Union in Argentina. All her films portray women struggling to find a place within a patriarchal setting and have profound auto-biographical undertones.
Bemberg worked closely with her long-term producer Lita Stantic, with whom she founded the production company GEA. Stantic went on to direct her own films, including Un Muro de Silencio, starring another Hollywood star, Vanessa Redgrave, about an English journalist investigating the disappearances during the 1976 Milirary Dictatorship. It was a credit to the reputation of these two remarkable filmmakers that they were able to secure such high-profile international talent. After Bemberg's death, Lita was a massive influence over the new generation of Argentine filmmakers, producing Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga ( 2001), Israel Adrán Caetano's The Red Bear (2002) and Paulina (2015) by Santiago Mitre, to name but a few.
Paula Hernández was part of this critically-acclaimed new generation. Her 2001 gem of a film 'Inheritance', was followed by 'Rain' (2008) and 'The Sleepwalkers' (2019) which represented Argentina at the 93rd Oscars. 'The Siamese Bond' (2020) explored a mother-daughter relationship and in 'A Ravaging Wind' (2023) she examines a daughter dealing with her evangelical father.
Lucrecia Martel hit the ground running with her debut film La Ciénaga (2001). Through the observations of one family holiday during a stiflingly hot summer, Martel manages to express the social stagnation and disintegration of a whole country. Born in 1966, in Salta, the Northwest of Argentina, Martel attended the National Film School in Buenos Aires. After La Ciénaga, Martel filmed 'The Holy Girl' (2004), about a 16- year- old girl who becomes fixated on saving the soul of a middle- aged doctor. She followed this with La Mujer sin Cabeza (2008) and her most recent Zama (2017)
Finally, newcomer Lola Arias followed up her innovative play 'Minefield' which saw Argentina and British Malvinas veterans on stage together, with an award-winning musical documentary ‘REAS’ - a novel take on the prison documentary, transforming the genre into an oasis of comradery and music.
MEXICO
While Mexican male film directors taking of over Hollywood - on the side lines Mexican female filmmakers have also been making a splash. Lila Aviles' recently acclaimed Totem was Mexico's contender for the Oscars in 2024. Both Totem and La Camarista (2018) were showered with awards, as Aviles moved audiences and critics with her profoundly intimate, authentic and personal films.
Fernanda Valadez has been making an impact at the festivals with her powerful studies of life on the Mexican border. With writer/producer Astrid Rondero, her first feature, Sin Señas Particulares ('Identifying Features' 2020) is a cry of rage on behalf of Mexicans living in a no-man’s land of lawlessness, corruption and violence. Their latest beautifully-shot film Sujo (2024) has won 8 awards and had 25 nominations.
Meanwhile, after her debut feature Semana Santa,Alejandra Márquez Abella made a splash with Las Niñas Bien in 2019 which won Best Film at The Malaga Film Festival as well as Best Screenplay, and nominations for Best Director. It also won Best Film at the Ariel Awards. Her third feature, Mexican Western 'Northern Skies of an Empty Space' is also critically acclaimed.
Director, writer and producer Lorena Valencia’s ‘Dandelion’ won the top prize at the 2024 ‘16 Days 16 Films’ competition, while ‘Esperanza’ written and directed by Mayra Veliz and ‘A Very Nice Guy’ by Minerva R Bolaños, featured among the 16 finalists. Esperanza and ‘Dandelion’ both deal with the abuse that women face in Mexico, while ‘A very Nice Guy’ comes at the theme from the male point of view. In 2022 in the same competition, Melissa Elizondo, carried away the winning prize with her film Hilo Rojo.
Also worth mentioning is Kenya Márquez and her second feature Asfixia (Suffocation 2018), screened at the Raindance Film Festival 2020, about the struggle to breathe freely in Mexico's dark world of betrayals, racism, sexism and machismo. Chicana director also Melissa Guerrero made her feature film debut at the Sundance Film Festival with Mosquita y Mari, becoming the first Chicana filmmaker to debut a feature-length film there.
BRAZIL
Helena Solberg is one of Brazil’s greatest living documentary film directors. Her first film, A Entrevista (1966), marked her as a pioneer of Cinema Novo and also as a target for the military dictatorship, who saw thinking out of the box as a threat. She lived in United States in exile for more than 30 years, working mostly for television making documentaries such as Doble Jornada (1975), Desde las cenizas: Nicaragua hoy (1982) - for which she won an Emmy Award and Chile: por la razón o por la fuerza (1983). In the 1990s she returned to Brazil for good, leading another cultural movement Cine de Retomada, with one of her most internationally recognized films, Carmen Miranda: bananas is my business (1995). She made her first fiction feature film this year Vida de Menina which accrued Best Film, Screenplay, Photography, Soundtrack, Art Direction and Best Film by the audience at the Gramado Film Festival.
In 2017, Juliana Rojo co-directed 'Good Manners' an unusual thriller/fantasy/horror film about Clara, a lonely nurse from the outskirts of São Paulo, hired by mysterious and wealthy Ana as the nanny for her unborn child. The film garnered 32 festival wins and 34 nominations. Her latest film Cidade; Campo (2024), two stories of migration, one in the city and one in the country, has already accrued three wins and nine nominations.
Actor Bárbara Paz turned to directing after her famous director husband, Héctor Babenco, died of cancer in 2016. Documenting the last years of his life she created her moving film ‘Babenco:Tell me when I Die’ (2019) won Best Documentary at the Venice Film Festival. It is an intensely emotional and intimate film where Babenco bares his soul and reveals his worst fears, his memories and fantasies.
Maya Da-Rin's multi-award winning 'The Fever' (2019) set in the bustling industrial hub of Manaus was a powerful comment on the struggles of the Amerindian peoples in modern day Brazil, as experienced through the moving relationship of a father and his daughter.
Newcomer Flávia Neves created waves with her opera prima thriller 2022 Fogaréu, - the story of a wealthy Brazilian family that interweaves class struggles with intimate family strife in Goiás. With Lucrecia Martel and Juliana Rojas as script consultants, she achieved 3rd place in the Panorama competition of the Berlin Film Festival 2022.
COLOMBIA
Born in Bogotá into a working-class family of rural workers who moved to the city, it was during CRISTINA GALLEGO'S studies of Film and TV at the National University of Colombia that she met Ciro Guerra. Gallego’s collaboration with (now ex-husband) Ciro Guerra led to a series of powerful films. She produced 'Embrace of the Serpent' (2015), 'Birds of Passage' (2018) and Memoria (2021) which have all garnered no fewer than 46 wins and 32 nominations between them, including Oscar nominations, putting Colombia back on the global map as a major producer. Colombian-American Patricia Cardoso is best known for her 2002 film Real Women Have Curves, follows a young Mexican-American woman navigating the challenges of family, culture and body image.
CHILE
Maite Alberdi's 'The Mole Agent' (2020) was the first Chilean documentary nominated for an Oscar. In it, private detective Sérgio is hired to enter a nursing home to check out if allegations of ill treatment of his client’s mother are true. Alberdi's discretion was such that it was almost impossible to believe a whole team of film makers are following Sergio around.Alberdi followed this with 'The Eternal Memory' (2023) in which Augusto and Paulina, together and in love for 25 years, have their lives torn apart by Alzheimers. 'In her Place' (2024) which details a 1955 murder case when María Carolina Geel, a popular writer, kills her lover. Alberdi has developed a particular style exploring inner, intimate worlds, making her one of the most important voices coming out of Latin America.
In 2022, another Chilean director Manuela Martelli won the ‘First Feature’ Category at the BFI London Film Festival with ‘1976’ - a study how the repressive regime of General Augusto Pinochet gradually encroaches on a woman’s normal life, three years on from the violent coup d’état in 1973 that deposed President Allende.
URUGUAY
Writer/ directors Leticia Jorge Romero and Ana Guevara from Uruguay have produced two shorts - 'The Guest Room' and 'Summer Runners' - and three feature films - ‘So Much Water’ (2013), which garnered five wins and seven nominations, Alelí (2019) and the most recent ‘Don’t You Let Me Go’ (2024) - a tale about timeless friendship and sisterhood. Their films are emotionally charged with stories built around simple and profound observations of people's interactions.
PERU
A pioneer of Latin American film, back in the 1990s, Maria Barea filmed the plight of young indigenous women working as domestic servants in Peru "to give them a voice." The result Antuca (1992) and Porque Quería Estudiar - fictionalised accounts of lives of toil, abuse and hopes in Peru - received massive critical acclaim and were recently restored and screened at The Barbican
Melina León's ‘Song without a Name’ (2019) explores the anguish of a 20 yr-old-mother whose new-born baby girl is stolen at a fake health clinic. A journalist finally decides to help her with her investigation. León’s film is a sharp critique of the conditions of indigenous mothers and the lack of assistance from the authorities. Melina was the first Peruvian female film maker to premier at Cannes and has attracted 33 wins and 25 nominations.
Patricia Wiesse Risso's Mujer de Soldado screened at The Human Rights Watch, follows the journey of Magda as she returns to her hometown for the first time in thirty years with the intention of bringing forward a court case against the soldier who raped her. Magda seeks to prove to the villagers that she was not the 'soldier’s girlfriend' nor a terrorist but rather a survivor of sexual abuse committed by an armed officer when she was just a girl.
COSTA RICA
Antonella Sudasassi Furniss has just landed her country's submission to the 97th Academy Awards with the moving ‘Memories of a Burning Body.’ Winner of the Panorama Audience Award at the 2024 Berlinale, the film explores a feminine viewpoint of sex, particularly from older women who have managed to rise above societal repression. Another Costa Rican-Swedish director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén received 17 wins and 20 nominations in 2021 with Clara Sola which opened at the Cannes Director’s Fortnight in 2021.