ABSTRACT
The last decade has seen a growing internationalisation of film production in Chile. The new Chilean cinema “for export” has had a recent boost in the international film market partly owing to the specific positioning strategy of Chilean professionals, facilitated by internationalisation policies developed by both the centre-left and right-wing Chilean governments since 2005. This recent Chilean cinema has mostly been produced by a group of upper-middle-class filmmakers who are involved in international film circulation. Their films’ aesthetics are to a great extent grounded in their international experience, which has enabled them to position themselves as “global citizens” and part of the international community of global art cinema.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the Chilean filmmaking community (2011–2015), this chapter discusses how this new Chilean cosmopolitanism is associated with new practices and imaginaries of upper-middle-class mobility and citizenship. The chapter examines the articulation between recent Chilean cultural policies and the construction of filmmakers’ discourses of citizenship, embedded in both national belonging and political commitment. Moreover, it looks at the way in which filmmakers’ cultural practices unveil some of the contradictions of the upper-middle-class ideas of citizenship and the nation-building processes in the recent global context.
