Introduction

This chapter explores the first decade of this millennium; a decade which began with a deep economic crisis but ended witnessing solid economic growth. The change in the political scenario, announced in the previous chapter, was consolidated when Tabaré Vázquez, the presidential candidate of the Broad Front (FA), took office in 2005. The state budget was to be distributed differently, including a much larger investment in culture through the creation of specific funds, from which filmmakers began to benefit. In addition to the funds explored in the previous chapter, this chapter introduces new sources of funding specifically designed to support the development of the national audiovisual production. This national context, in conjunction with other international factors, promoted an impressive increase in the number of productions, which became more diverse and professional. However, even if the scenario definitely changed and it certainly became easier for filmmakers to access public money to make their films, they were still independent individuals who worked on a shoestring budget, spending years scrabbling together the necessary funds to produce their films and who continued exploring cheaper technologies to finish their projects. In addition to the continuous production of documentaries, most of which were related to the recent past, this decade testified to an unprecedented number of feature-length fiction films. Whereas in documentaries there was a noticeable negotiation between memory and oblivion, fictions showed a tension between the artisanal model of working at home and the industrial practice of circulating and trading films internationally.

The first case study is 25 Watts (Pablo Stoll and Juan Pablo Rebella, 2001), a project originally conceived as an independent film made among friends, which became the stepping stone of Control Z, a company producing most of the Uruguayan films which gained international recognition during this decade; the second film analysed is Hit! Historia de canciones que hicieron historia (Hit! History of Songs which Made History; Claudia Abend and Adriana Loeff, 2008, henceforth Hit!), a documentary which makes explicit its performative characteristics in order to address the cultural interruptions caused by the dictatorship; and the final section examines Reus (Pablo Fernández, Alejandro Pi and Eduardo Piñeiro, 2010), a feature which deeply engages with the heterogeneity of Uruguayan society, in terms of class and migration, exploring the popular appeal of international genre conventions.