Film Database
Latin American cinema is vast, diverse and constantly growing. We do not pretend to provide an exhaustive list of all Latin American films here. Furthermore, many countries maintain their own film databases (Cinematecas) which are much more complete than our collection, if you are looking for a comprehensive national inventory. Instead, our film database provides a curated collection of frequently and recently taught films, all of which are associated with a related teaching resource (e.g. syllabus, film guide) published on Cinegogía. Our database provides search mechanisms to filter these films by title, director, release date, language, country, production companies, category (documentary, fiction or experimental), cinematic period, genre, subjects, and tags. We have also included synopses from reliable sources.
Depending on your interests and teaching needs, here are several different ways you can search the database.
BROWSE: click here
You can browse a list of all the film entries in the database, item by item. This section allows you to sort the hundreds of films by date added or alphabetically by title. This kind of digital browsing is the equivalent of browsing the film stacks at your institution’s Media Center or walking into a Blockbuster in the 1990s and scanning film titles to see if something catches your eye.
TAGS: click here
Our tags identify smaller groups of films that share a particular focus or identity which tends to be more specific than the broader topic categories. For example, searching the topic (below) “Afro-Latin American / afro latinoamericano” will return all films, from any country, that intersect with the black Latin American experience. On the other hand, the tag for “Afro-Caribbean / afro-caribeño” will produce a shorter list of films focused on the black experience in the Caribbean region. The “tags” page also provides a word cloud that visually represents the frequency of these descriptors by emphasizing tags with more or less associated films.
TOPICS (see below)
Click on any of the topics below to return a list of Latin American films that deal with these umbrella subjects. This approach can help you build a group of films from different Latin American countries/regions or time periods that tackle similar subjects from different cultural, social, or political contexts.
- Afro-Latin American / afro latinoamericano
- Authoritarianism / autoritarismo
- Borderlands & Boundaries / fronteras
- Country life / el campo
- Drug traffic / narcotráfico
- Emigration and immigration / emigración e inmigración
- Environment / el medio ambiente
- Ethnicity / etnicidad
- Exile / exilio
- Gender identity / identidad de género
- Human Rights / derechos humanos
- Identity / identidad
- Indigenous peoples / Pueblos indígenas
- LGBTQ people / personas LGBTQ
- Memory / memoria
- Migration, Internal / migración interna
- Music / la música
- Nationalism / nacionalismo
- Political violence / violencia política
- Popular Culture / cultura popular
- Race / raza
- Relationships / relaciones
- Religion & Spirituality / religión & espiritualidad
- Revolution / revolución
- Slavery / esclavitud
- Social inequality / desigualdad social
- Sports / deporte
- Transnationalism / transnacionalismo
- Underdevelopment / subdesarrollo
- Urban Life / vida urbana
- Violence / violencia
SEARCH: click here
Search the entire collection of films, film guides and syllabi by using keywords or restricting your search to specific fields, such as name of director, year of release, country, spoken language, genre, and subject coverage.