Cinema and dictatorship
During the thirty years of the dictatorship (1930-1961), cinema was used for propaganda purposes. Sound was first used in 1930 for a newsreel about the dictator Trujillo (1891-1961).
In 1953, filmmaker Rafael Augusto Sanchez Sanlley (Pupito) founded the first local film company, Cine Dominicano, with which he produced various documentaries. These dealt with the misery of the people at the time, a far cry from the opulence of the Trujillo family. This enterprise was severely repressed by the dictator, who ordered its dismantling.
After the end of the dictatorial regime, playwright and politician Franklin Domínguez shot the first Dominican feature film, La Silla (1963), denouncing the horrors of the last years, with a single actor: Camillo Carrau.
Throughout his career, René Fortunato has documented Dominican artistic history: in 1985 Tras las huellas de Palau(In Palau's Footsteps), celebrating the pioneer of local cinema, but also political history with, from 1991 to 1996, the trilogy Trujillo: el poder del jefe, and most recently, in 2009 Juan Bosch: Presidente en la frontera imperial.
Political history continues to be dealt with in the cinema today, with the 2009 release of Juan Delacer's Trópico de Sangre , a film about the Trujillo era and the tragic fate of the Mirabal sisters who opposed him. Dominican-Puerto Rican actress Michelle Rodriguez plays the lead role.
Foreign films in the Dominican Republic
The country has served as a setting for many films, including some of the great classics of world cinema. In 1974, the scenes of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather II, which were supposed to take place in Cuba, were in fact shot in the colonial zone of Santo Domingo. The famous scene taking place on a terrace in Havana was shot in the Embajador Hotel, west of the city. In 1979, Coppola decided to return to the Dominican Republic to shoot some scenes of the mythical Apocalypse Now, in the vicinity of the Chavon River, in La Romana. Again in 1985, La Romana hosted the shooting of Rambo II by George Pan Cosmatos. More recently, we can mention Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) by Gore Verbinski, Reasons of State (2006) by Robert de Niro, Miami Vice (2006) by Michael Mann with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, but also xXx: Reactivated (2017) by DJ Caruso with Vin Diesel. More recently, the film The Lost City, released in 2022 and starring Sandra Bullock and Brad Pitt, was almost entirely shot in the Dominican Republic (Samana, Juan Dolio and Santo Domingo in particular).
Contemporary Dominican directors
A Dominican production has taken the world by storm: the comedy Sanky Panky, by director José Enrique Pintor Pinky. The film, which follows the tribulations of young Dominicans in search of tourist favors, broke all attendance records when it was released in early 2007. A second opus came out in 2013, followed by Sanky Panky 3, released in 2018.
On the international festival front, José María Cabral made a name for himself by becoming the first Dominican director to be selected for the Sundance Film Festival with his 2017 film Carpinteros - which tells the love story of a newcomer to a Dominican prison.
A committed contemporary figure in Dominican cinema, critically acclaimed Laetitia Tonos is the first woman to break into the industry. Her films La hija natural (Love child) (2011), Cristo Rey (2013), or Mis 500 locos (A state of madness) (2020) tackle identity and Caribbean history in all their complexity.
