Film arrived in South America in the late 1890s and took root in the major hubs of Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and Santiago. The early silent era was highly artisanal, but by the 1910s and 1920s, Argentina and Brazil began producing more domestically oriented works. The introduction of sound in the 1930s paradoxically protected local markets from total Hollywood dominance by introducing a language barrier. This triggered a “Golden Age” for Argentine cinema (the 1930s–1950s), which standardised studio production and exported popular tango musicals and melodramas across the Spanish-speaking world until a U.S. wartime film-stock boycott crippled its momentum. Concurrently in Brazil, the commercial chanchada—lighthearted, musical-comedy satires—dominated theatre screens. While these early industries succeeded commercially, they frequently relied on Hollywood formulas or localised escapism, largely ignoring the stark social inequalities and rural realities of the continent.

The 1960s and 1970s marked a radical ideological shift, giving birth to the New Latin American Cinema movement, which rejected both Hollywood commercialism and European auteurism. The definitive vanguard was Brazil’s Cinema Novo, spearheaded by filmmakers like Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Adopting the iconic mantra “a camera in hand and an idea in mind,” Cinema Novo drew from Italian Neorealism to capture the raw, impoverished realities of urban favelas and the drought-ridden northeastern sertão.

Simultaneously in Argentina, theorists and filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino conceptualised “Third Cinema”—a militant, anti-colonial manifesto that viewed the camera as a political weapon to provoke systemic revolution. This highly intellectual, visually daring, and politically charged era across countries like Chile and Bolivia was tragically cut short or pushed underground by a wave of brutal, U.S.-backed military dictatorships that imposed severe censorship and forced many of the continent’s finest artists into exile.

The transition back to democracy in the late 1980s and 1990s sparked a profound cinematic renaissance. Argentine cinema broke through internationally with Luis Puenzo’s The Official Story (1985), which became the first Latin American film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film by directly confronting the horrors of the military dictatorship’s “disappeared” citizens.

By the turn of the 21st century, South American cinema shifted from ideological overtures to gritty, high-production realism and sophisticated human dramas. Brazil captivated global audiences with the kinetic, visceral storytelling of Fernando Meirelles’ City of God (2002), while Argentina solidified its reputation for sharp, character-driven narratives with Juan José Campanella’s Oscar-winning The Secret in Their Eyes (2009) and Damián Szifron’s dark comedy Wild Tales (2014).