Chilean cinema is a story of extremes: a century of fragile starts, abrupt silences, and then, in the last fifteen years, a remarkable burst of global recognition. It is a cinema that has often been forced to exist in the margins – first against the dominance of Hollywood, then against a brutal dictatorship – and has repeatedly turned that marginality into its greatest strength. From the silent swashbuckling of “El Húsar de la Muerte” to the Oscar-winning triumph of “Una mujer fantástica”, Chilean filmmakers have learned to make necessity look like style.
The history of Chilean cinema begins almost as soon as the medium itself arrived in the country. The first public projection took place in Santiago in 1896, just a year after the Lumière brothers’ famous Paris screening. Early national production was mostly documentary in nature, capturing public events and landscapes. The oldest surviving Chilean film is a short actuality, “Ejercicio general del cuerpo de bomberos” (1902), and the first fictional work, “Manuel Rodríguez” (1910), was a patriotic drama released for the Centennial of Independence.
The real explosion, however, came in the 1920s. Between 1920 and 1927, Chilean filmmakers produced over fifty feature-length silent films . This was the era of Pedro Sienna, whose “El Húsar de la Muerte” (1925) remains the foundational text of Chilean cinema – a swashbuckling adventure about the independence-era hero Manuel Rodríguez that was recently restored in 4K and declared a national monument. The boom was short-lived.
The arrival of Hollywood distributors and the Great Depression devastated local production by the end of the decade, and the transition to sound in the 1930s proved difficult. The first Chilean sound film, “Norte y Sur” (1934), was a modest success, but it was not until the state-backed Chile Films was created in 1942 that a true industrial model was attempted. Chile Films aimed to replicate the studio systems of Mexico and Argentina, but mismanagement and the inability to compete with American imports led to its collapse by the end of the 1940s .
The 1960s brought a political and aesthetic awakening. Influenced by Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave, a generation of filmmakers began to see cinema as a tool for social transformation. The creation of film clubs, particularly the one in Viña del Mar, and the founding of the Film Institute at the Catholic University of Santiago laid the institutional groundwork. This movement, known as the Nuevo Cine Chileno (New Chilean Cinema), produced works of raw urgency. Raúl Ruiz’s “Tres tristes tigres” (1968), Aldo Francia’s “Valparaíso mi amor” (1969), and Miguel Littin’s “El Chacal de Nahueltoro” (1969) turned their cameras on the country’s stark inequalities and marginalized communities .
This period of artistic ferment aligned directly with the short unsuccessful reign of Salvador Allende (1970-1973). Cinema was explicitly framed as a weapon of political struggle, and Chile Films was nationalized. Documentaries like Patricio Guzmán’s “El primer año” (1972) and Littin’s “Compañero Presidente” (1971) captured the hope and tension of the era. This entire movement was violently interrupted by the military coup of September 11, 1973. The archives of Chile Films were destroyed, film clubs were shut down, and many filmmakers were forced into exile, imprisoned, or disappeared.
The period of Augusto Pinochet’s ruling (1973-1990) created a bifurcated cinema. Inside Chile, production virtually ceased, reduced to a handful of films and clandestine video projects. Outside, however, a powerful “Chilean cinema of resistance” emerged. Exiled filmmakers like Patricio Guzmán completed his monumental documentary “La batalla de Chile” (1975-1979), a searing record of the coup and its aftermath that became a global symbol of solidarity. Miguel Littin made “Actas de Marusia” (1976), and Marilú Mallet and others produced works of denunciation and memory from Europe, Mexico and Cuba. It is estimated that between 1973 and 1984, 199 films by Chilean directors were produced abroad, while only five were made inside the country.
When democracy returned in 1990, Chilean cinema faced a new challenge: how to narrate a nation traumatized by seventeen years of silence. The 1990s and 2000s were a period of slow reconstruction and diversification. Filmmakers like Silvio Caiozzi (“La luna en el espejo”, 1990) and Ricardo Larraín (“La frontera”, 1991) began to address the legacy of the past, but a true “boom” was still on the horizon.
The real international explosion of Chilean cinema came in the 2000s and 2010s, driven by a generation often called the “Novísimo Cine Chileno” . This wave was characterized by formal experimentation, a focus on intimate stories, and a willingness to confront the lingering wounds of the past through new lenses. Andrés Wood’s Machuca (2004), a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of the 1973 coup, is widely considered the best Chilean film of the 21st century in critical polls.
The defining figure of this era is arguably Pablo Larraín, whose trilogy Tony Manero (2008), Post Mortem (2010), and No (2012) dissected the dictatorship through dark, often grotesque allegory. No earned Chile its first Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film . Simultaneously, Sebastián Lelio was crafting a different kind of cinema—intimate, character-driven, and deeply empathetic. His Gloria (2013), about a middle-aged woman seeking love and autonomy, and Una mujer fantástica (2017), a groundbreaking transgender drama, culminated in Chile’s first Academy Award win for Best Foreign Language Film in 2018.
Beyond these stars, a new generation of female directors has reshaped the landscape. Maite Alberdi has become a major force in documentary, earning Oscar nominations for El agente topo (2020) and La memoria infinita (2023), while Manuela Martelli’s 1976 (2022) and her latest, El deshielo (2026), continue to explore the psychological aftermath of the dictatorship through genre and mystery . The selection of El deshielo as Chile’s 2027 Oscar submission, in a year where half of the submitted films were directed by women, signals a significant shift in the industry’s demographics.
Throughout its history, the most consistent through-line of Chilean cinema has been its documentary tradition. From the early actualities to the militant films of the Allende years and the exile testimonies, non-fiction has been the genre where Chilean filmmakers have most directly interrogated their reality. Contemporary documentarians like Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff (Un hombre aparte, Surire) and Maite Alberdi have perfected a style that is observational, deeply human, and subtly political . As one scholarly assessment notes, the documentary has been the genre with “the greatest potential” in Chile, consistently reconstructing and problematizing the relationship with the recent past while interrogating the contradictions of the present.
Chilean cinema today is a paradox. It is celebrated globally – winning Oscars, competing at Cannes and Berlin – yet it struggles to connect with its domestic audience. Filmmakers like Jorge Riquelme (Isla Negra, 2025) openly complain that local distributors do not believe in Chilean cinema, and that their films often perform better abroad. The ecosystem is supported by state funds and international co-productions, but recent political shifts have threatened this model; in 2026, the Audiovisual Investment Support Fund was slashed by 64%, prompting the Chilean Film Academy to call for the strengthening of public support “without censorship or prejudice”.
Despite these challenges, the story of Chilean cinema is one of remarkable resilience. It is a cinema that was born poor, was nearly killed by a dictatorship, and rebuilt itself into one of the most vital voices in Latin America. Whether through the surreal labyrinths of Raúl Ruiz, the searing documentaries of Patricio Guzmán, or the intimate dramas of Lelio and Martelli, Chilean filmmakers have consistently found ways to make the personal political and the political deeply personal. The screen, for Chile, has never been merely a window; it has been a battlefield, a memory palace, and a tool for survival.