Paper short abstract:

The “newest” Chilean cinema, to a great extent promoted by Chilean centre-left cultural polices, has had a significant international success in recent years. The paper addresses aspects of the political economy of this kind of production, and the local critical reception of its predominant images.

Paper long abstract:

The last 20 years, in Chile there has been a strong boost of national film production. The centre-left government developed a new set of cultural policies, which were intended to recover the state's involvement in the industry, abruptly interrupted during the former right-wing dictatorship. This has implied a significant transformation in the context of production, including the legal framework of audio-visual production, the funding system and the possibilities of exhibition; as well as the spectrum of Chilean film production. As a result, Chilean cinema has been largely subsided by the state, driven by the attempt -arguably contradictory- to potentiate cinema as an economically successful national industry framed in the neoliberal model. Film production has been often supported under the assumption that film would potentiate certain "national image": local and "popular" during the 1990s, and more "cosmopolitan" since the mid-2000s, linked to a growing internationalization of Chilean film. The paper addresses the relative consolidation of this "Newest" Chilean Cinema in this context, which has showed a consistent success in the international festival circuit in recent years. Particularly, the paper aims to analyse the latest Chilean cinema "for export", suggesting the emergence of certain type of predominant Chilean-international aesthetic. It focuses in the type of national and political imaginaries traceable in most of this production, as well as in the local reception and political critique of the films in Chile, where they have been understood as a valuable yet troublesome kind of national cinema.