Shifting from Identity to Marketing: Central American Cinema as a Brand for Sales, not a Place in the Making

Abstract

Analysing Central American Cinema from an Actor-Network Theory perspective reveals the pre-eminence of transnational dynamics. The region becomes a brand for filmmaking, a resource to increase the possibilities of global displayability. Such instrumentalization is a reminder that movies are cultural objects that combine technical, political, and economic factors. Films do not belong to a place: they perform exchanges as immaterial commodities, extracting value through the image and the gaze. Instead of assigning or reading local identity roles in a cinema category, I propose to analyze how the classification reproduces a colonial perspective, reifying a place for the sake of the image.