In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a group of Latin American films – Amores perros (Love's a Bitch 2000), Y tu mamá también (And your mother too 2001), Cidade de Deus (City of God 2002), Central do Brasil (Central Station 1998), Nueve reinas (Nine Queens 2001), El hijo de la novia (Son of the Bride 2001) – enjoyed an unprecedented level of critical and commercial success in world film markets. At the time, these films were often talked about as part of a newly ‘transnationalised’ Latin American cinema wherein the term ‘transnational’ pointed towards the multiple ways they had benefited from capital or creative input or influences from outside their country of production (Baer and Long 2004; Deleyto and del Mar Azcona 2010; Poblete 2004; Sampaio 2011). Some of these influences included: engaging with aesthetic global trends or with popular genre templates more commonly found in Hollywood filmmaking; receiving script development support from US-based institutions such as the Sundance Institute or US- or partially US-owned companies such as Disney, Miramax, Patagonik; whole or fractional funding from transnational or multinational corporations or bodies; innovative marketing campaigns funded by US-based global distribution networks, and global distribution through these same networks. When these films were followed in the 2000s by a series of equally critical and/or commercially successful ‘deterritorialised’ films, films that were shot and/or co-produced outside their directors’ national industries and most often, but not always, in English (21 Grams [2003], Babel [2006], Biutiful [2010], Children of Men [2006], The Constant Gardener [2005], Blindness [2008], Hellboy [2004], Hellboy II: The Golden Army [2008], El espinazo del diablo [The Devil's Backbone 2001] El laberinto del fauno [Pan's Labyrith 2006], and Diarios de motocicleta [Motorcycle Diaries 2004]) the terms of a transnationalised Latin American cinema (including any notion of continental specificity) were much less frequently evoked to describe them and their connection to a sense of the nation or national cinema rarely made (Boyle 2009; Udden 2009; Mafe 2011; King 2004).

In some academic criticism the first group of films was collectively hailed as the poster films of a Latin American cinematic renaissance (Hart 2004: 13) whilst other criticism downplayed the films’ significance in relation to broader continental trends (Page 2009: 10).