The first films
At the very beginning of the twentieth century, it was thanks to a cinematograph (a projector invented by the Lumières brothers) that astonished spectators were able to discover images shot in Europe. Ecuadorian cinema only really took off in the early 1920s. Augusto San Miguel's first feature film, El Tesoro de Atahualpa ("Atahualpa's Treasure"), tells the story of a doctor's apprentice who sets out on the trail of an Inca treasure. It was released on August 7, 1924 - a date that Raúl Vallejo, then Minister of Culture, chose to celebrate as National Cinema Day in 2006. During the same decade, Italian Carlo Crespi shot the first documentary: Los Invencibles Shuaras del Alto Amazonas (The Invincible Shuar of the Amazonas Mountains). This silent film, one of the first ethnographic documentaries in Latin America, shows the work of missionaries among the Shuar, the most numerous indigenous people in Amazonia.
An important documentary production
Between 1930 and 1931, the arrival of talking pictures hampered the development of Ecuadorian cinema, which did not yet benefit from this technology. To get around this delay, some filmmakers came up with another form of entertainment. They set up screenings with sonorización en vivo, i.e. live sound with the addition of texts and songs recited at the same time as the film. A fine attempt, but not enough to launch fiction cinema in Ecuador. Consequently, until around 1950, film production was limited to documentaries and tourist films. In the 1960s, Ecuadorian filmmakers began collaborating with their Mexican counterparts. This led to numerous co-productions and the emergence of the documentary genre, notably with the creation of the Ecuadorian Association of Film Authors in 1977.
The Ulises Estrella National Film Library, created in 1981, boasts an incredible collection of old films, with nearly 4,000 films and 10,000 original documents in its archive!
Film development and critical success
From the 1980s onwards, fiction cinema began to develop once again. A fine example is Camilo Luzuriaga's La Tigra (1989), an adaptation of a work by José de la Cuadra, an Ecuadorian writer and one of the finest exponents of magic realism.
Sebastián Cordero's film Ratas, ratones, rateros (1999) made Ecuadorian cinema the talk of Europe. Born in Quito in 1972, after studying cinema at Southern California University, the director decided to return to Ecuador with a view to developing the film industry, which was virtually non-existent at the time. He made a name for himself with his film Crónicas, which was screened at Cannes in the "Un certain regard" category in 2004 and nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2011, his film Pescador was nominated at the San Sebastián Film Festival. He has since directed two new films: Europa Resort (2013) and Sin muertos no hay carnaval (2016).
Today, national production remains modest, but nonetheless promising, and it's clear that the emergence of this new generation of filmmakers is giving Ecuadorian cinema its credentials in the eyes of Europeans. Over the past ten years, filmmakers such as Victor Arregui, Mateo Herrera, Anahí Hoenesein and Daniel Andrade have made their mark on the Ecuadorian film scene. Director Tania Hermida, after her first film Qué tan lejos ("So Far Away") released in 2006, became a member of the country's constituent assembly.
The state and national production
The dynamism of Ecuadorian production led the government to approve the first Cinema Law in 2006. This law, aimed at the development of national cinema, has accelerated the growth and consolidation of the Ecuadorian film industry, providing support for new film projects (feature-length fiction or documentaries), and for the post-production of feature-length films, shorts and animated or experimental films.
The CNCINE, Consejo Nacional de Cinematografía, is today an institution in charge of developing the film and audiovisual industry in the country, and promoting national cinema abroad. Production, driven by financial support from the government, is expanding (20 films were made in 2014 alone!). At the same time, a marginal cinema produced outside the cultural and commercial circuits, the "cine bajo tierra" (as this underground new wave is called), is enjoying some success. The documentary Más allá del Mall (Miguel Alvear, 2010) takes a humorous look at the subject.
Ecuadorian cinema in Europe
An "Ecuadorian Film Week" has been organized in Paris since 2011 at the Institut Cervantes, under the patronage of the Ecuadorian Embassy in France and the ARC association. The event aims to showcase contemporary Ecuadorian cinema in France. In 2019, for the ninth edition, the public had the opportunity to discover at the closing ceremony the beautiful documentary La Playa De Esmeraldas by Patrice Reynal, which tackles the invisibilization of Afro-descendants. Directors such as Javier Izquierdo, Lionel Retornaz and Isabel Centeno also presented their films.
Documentary films are regularly shown in France, at festivals and sometimes in cinemas. For example, two Ecuadorian documentaries stood out at the Ciné Latino festival in Toulouse in April 2014: El grill de Cesar by Dario Aguirre, which tackles his quest for paternal love through his own journey of integration to acquire German citizenship, and La mort de Jaime Roldós by Lisandra Rivera and Manolo Sarmiento. This film is about the short presidency of Jaime Roldos, the first democratically elected president, before his plane crash.
In 2016, a film entitled On revient de loin, directed by Frenchmen Pierre Carles and Nina Faure, was released in French cinemas. A documentary about the country's recovery and the work of former president Correa.
