Reel potential: Is Uruguay South America’s next cinema hotspot?
Montevideo scripts are producing streaming hits, behind some scene-stealing tax initiatives.
Facundo Ponce de León is a man on the move. The president of the Uruguayan Film and Audiovisual Agency has just landed back in Montevideo after a whistle-stop tour of Europe, touting his country at the London Film Festival as the place to make movies in 2025 and learning how the UK and Germany built their national film archives. “We’ve never had a film win a Palme d’Or in Cannes or even be in the main festival,” says Ponce de León. “But we are creating the conditions to get there in the next two or three years.”
Uruguay came on the radar of many film-location scouts during the pandemic, when it became the first country in Latin America to open its borders to working film crews. It might lack the snowy peaks of Patagonia or the grandeur of Lake Titicaca but Uruguay is drawing the big streaming networks and studios with its generous tax and cash rebates. In 2024 there were 35 co-productions made in Uruguay, 12 of which were feature fiction films. In December 2024, Uruguay will host the Ventana Sur, Latin America’s biggest market for film and television, which is usually held in Argentina.
“Our offer to Netflix, Amazon, Paramount and others is that we give back up to 25 per cent of whatever they invest [in making a film here],” says Ponce de León. “If they hire a Uruguayan script writer or directors, even as a second unit, we will give them 5 per cent more.” That was the case with Amia, a slick series with a Uruguayan director on the crew, telling the story of the terror attacks on Israel’s embassy in Buenos Aires in the 1990s with Montevideo’s art deco centre standing in for the Argentine capital.
Uruguay is tapping into its larger neighbour’s stardom. Since Argentine president Javier Milei slashed public budgets, the state’s longstanding backing for cinema has sharply declined but in Montevideo a strategy to support film production is now a part of public policy that’s expected to continue into the next administration. At a tumultuous moment across Latin America, with political upheaval and shaky economies, the so-called “Switzerland of the Americas” looks relatively steady.
There are about 1,000 companies in the audiovisual sector in Uruguay, which international productions can tap into. “The field of people working in media here is enormous, given that it’s a population of just three million people,” says Pablo Casacuberta, a filmmaker and director of Montevideo’s Gen Centre for Arts and Sciences. His business partner, film producer Juan Ciapessoni, agrees. “For many years, Uruguay was a place to leave if you wanted to find investment,” he says. “But now it is becoming an island of stability.”
