The Crisis Isn’t Cinema. It’s the Industry.

Cinema Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Outdoor screening of Ángeles Cruz’s Valentina, or the Serenity during its 2025 traveling tour organized by OaxacaCine. Photo: Jalil Olmedo Courtesy: OaxacaCine

June 2025: We’re at a historical crossroads. Cinema doesn’t merely reflect our political and social crises—it participates in them. As global systems unravel—from media monopolies to cultural institutions—the world of film mirrors the instability, but it also carries within it the promise of renewal.

The challenges may seem insurmountable. The ecosystem feels broken. Distribution is collapsing, exhibition spaces are shrinking, and the public has been pushed to the margins. But how did we get here? What remains? What can we hold on to—and what might emerge from the rubble?

Cinema Is Thriving

With so much hand-wringing about (once again) the death of cinema, it might sound counterintuitive to make a case that cinema is the artform of our time. Yet it’s remarkable how artists from across disciplines—musicians, visual artists, writers, fashion designers, journalists, and others—have embraced cinema, infusing it with their sensibilities and creative input, while cinema has in turn opened new opportunities for these other art forms.

Up until about two decades ago, cinema was largely reserved for a select few—mostly film school graduates or industry insiders. With the advent of digital technologies, film production became more accessible and democratized, allowing new and unlikely voices to emerge and enriching the relatively young art form. Cinema’s influence is everywhere. Its language has entered museums and galleries. Its grammar has become the lingua franca of contemporary art. And television—via streaming platforms—has absorbed much of its vocabulary and visual conventions.

Moreover, in global regions like Latin America, this shift fostered a dynamic model of production that, by separating distribution and exhibition challenges from the creation process, gave filmmakers access to a diverse range of funding—public and private, local and international. This support enabled the creation of robust and vibrant filmographies, where artistic freedom remained central and numerous directors used it to push narrative and aesthetic boundaries.

It is through my work at Cinema Tropical—promoting and curating Latin American cinema in the U.S.—that I’m constantly in awe of the new films and filmmakers expanding the language and possibilities of cinema, offering bold, innovative stories that feel like guiding lights in this moment of global rupture.

I believe cinema is experiencing a golden era—enriched by a multitude of perspectives and creative energies.Yet from an audience perspective, it can often feel like the opposite: these remarkable works are increasingly hard to find, relegated to niche festivals or highly specialized platforms. As viewers, we’re often left feeling powerless—cut off from the most exciting and urgent cinema being made today.

The Crisis Is Structural, Not Artistic

Being a relatively young artform—born in 1895—cinema quickly raced to justify itself. Thanks to the contributions of many—particularly French theorists and filmmakers—it was finally accepted as art in the 1950s and 60s. The problem is that once cinema gained this validation, the critical and institutional frameworks used to understand it have remained largely unchallenged.

Film theory, for the most part, hasn’t evolved in decades. It has produced hegemonic categorizations that limit our ability to recenter the audience—imposing dichotomies such as commercial vs. arthouse, fiction vs. nonfiction, short film vs. feature, and national cinemas vs. auteur cinema. These divisions have narrowed how we present films and hinder the creation of broader dialogues.

And here we are, seventy years later, still consuming, philosophizing, discussing, and commercializing cinema in much the same way—even though the form itself has radically transformed, both in production and through the creative input of other artistic disciplines.

This infusion of creative energy has undeniably enriched and expanded film culture. Yet the film world remains entrenched in its own limitations, struggling to fully embrace and integrate this dynamic input. While film production has become more democratic and accessible, the other links in the chain—distribution and exhibition—tightened even more through the years. The pipeline narrowed even as output expanded.

Meanwhile, the mechanisms of validation, gatekeeping, and access have grown increasingly exclusionary. Today, whether a film costs $50,000 or $20 million, filmmakers are still competing for the same handful of sales agents, the same festivals, the same elusive distribution deals. Rather than examining its own dysfunction, the industry conveniently blames “overproduction” for the bottleneck—as a way of evading responsibility for the system it continues to uphold.

The film industry was already in decay when the pandemic hit—and then everything collapsed. Television, if we can still call it that, devoured cinema. Speculative capital—venture funds and stock-driven investments with little long-term commitment—rushed in through the streaming platforms.

In the post-pandemic landscape, we saw the emergence of a new monster: a hybrid of festivals, platforms, and distributors, largely fueled by speculative capital and oiled by media vertical integration—a single investment company owns and has major stakes in several trade publications, a prominent distribution company, and even a film festival. Today, the top festivals—Cannes, Venice, and their satellites—validate around 40 films per year. These chosen few receive all the attention, distribution, press, and awards. And the rest? Nothing. A grotesque version of the one-percent economy.

What is in crisis, then, is not the art form itself, but the structure and infrastructure that contain it. Cinema remains trapped in a deeply capitalist and outdated model: production–distribution–exhibition, a linear chain in which the surplus generated at each step is meant to sustain the next, and the final profit loops back to fund new production. But what happens when production is largely subsidized, and the rest of the chain still pretends to operate under the illusion of free market logic?

Ironically, cinema may well be the art form most obsessed with—and invested in—its own commercialization. (I don’t see artists in other fields attending endless seminars on how to capitalize their work.) Yet despite the vast resources poured into it, cinema consistently fails to achieve that goal. We've now created such a “sophisticated” model that no one really understands it anymore. Because, simply put, it doesn’t make sense.

The Audience Is Out of the Picture

Over time, the outdated models described above have pushed audiences further and further out of the equation. Obsessed with preserving a crumbling system, the industry has built an increasingly fragmented and convoluted process—one dominated by intermediaries who charge fees merely to grant filmmakers access to its inner workings. The benefits and profits of these intermediaries have become central to the industry’s practices, often at the expense of the very people it should serve: filmmakers and audiences.

More worrisome is that these days, filmmakers—especially first-timers—are effectively subsidizing the entire industry—unpaid—through applications, funding labs, grants, and festival fees, among other commissions. The film industry no longer generates value through its interaction with audiences, and one of the most alarming issues is that the audience has been almost entirely removed from the picture.

For the most part, filmmakers focus all their attention on completing their work, considering the audience only at the very end—essentially once the film is finished—and they rely heavily on intermediaries who themselves are increasingly struggling to envision audiences beyond the traditional, overburdened circuits.

Festivals are also finding it harder to attract audiences to their venues, and the ongoing crisis in journalism has led to a decline in quality film criticism. Arthouse theaters and distributors continue to depend largely on an urban, white, aging audience—one shaped by the European arthouse tradition of the 1960s and ’70s. This niche demographic is shrinking, even as passionate and curious viewers exist elsewhere, often unsure how to navigate the overwhelming complexity of today’s exhibition landscape and global film culture.

As in politics, the real beneficiaries are not the communities they claim to represent, but larger forces that profit from local dynamics. Similarly, in cinema, the primary stakeholders—filmmakers and audiences—are often an afterthought, while the center of the equation is dominated by what is called the film industry. There is an urgent need to reimagine this equation, placing filmmakers and audiences back at the core and creating virtuous ecosystems around them that can provide sustainable economic support.

Cinema Is a Performing Art

After 2020, cinema was flattened into just another product of the audiovisual industry—lumped in with TikToks, YouTube videos, and big-budget streaming series, and branded simply as “content.” But it was during the pandemic, when moviegoing ground to a halt and everything migrated to our devices, that I fully grasped something I had long suspected: cinema is a performing art.

This isn’t just a nostalgic or romantic idea. It’s an argument for understanding cinema not as a static object, but as an event—something that happens, something experienced, something that lives in time and space. Cinema is not merely a file, a product, or a commodity to be consumed; it’s an encounter occurring in a specific moment in time. That’s what sets it apart from the so-called “audiovisual industry.” And that’s what gives it its enduring power.

In this sense, cinema is closer to religion or music than it is to media. Like religion, it gathers people in a shared space—a kind of secular temple—where, for a few hours, they surrender to a ritual that is both collective and intimate, allowing them to connect with something larger than life in a profoundly personal way.

Music offers another useful analogy: its core lies in the live performance. A concert may be recorded and replayed, but the heart of it—the reason we go—is the event of the live moment. In that moment, something unique happens between the artist and the audience. Cinema, when experienced collectively and with intention, offers the same possibility.

This is why film festivals still matter. Despite their flaws and contradictions, festivals remain among the few spaces where cinema continues to function as a performing art. They offer programmed, time-bound, place-specific experiences that can’t be replicated elsewhere. The screening is a performance. The audience becomes part of the work. The filmmaker’s presence—or even their absence—is felt in the room. The energy of the crowd, the texture of the space, the act of watching together: all of it contributes to the meaning of the film.

This doesn’t mean cinema can’t or shouldn’t be streamed or experienced in other ways. On the contrary: we need these tools to reach broader audiences, especially those who don’t have access to in-person screenings. But we must keep centering cinema as a space of encounter, dialogue, and presence. Films don’t just live on hard drives or servers—they live in us, when we come together to watch them.

The Need to Democratize In-Person Exhibition

One key issue we must urgently address is the democratization of in-person exhibition. Our Latin American ancestors from the 1960s and ’70s—those who coined the term Third Cinema—understood this well. They identified three distinct forms of cinema: the industrial Hollywood model (now replicated by global streaming platforms), the European art-house tradition (still the dominant force at international festivals), and Third Cinema—a politically engaged, collective practice rooted in dialogue with its audience.

The call for a third route is as urgent today as it was fifty years ago. The lack of access to in-person exhibition, particularly in the U.S., is alarming. Major American cities are dominated by multiplexes, and even those fortunate enough to have an arthouse theater often find themselves recycling the same narrow slice of global film culture—films already validated by major festivals and institutions. What’s missing is a broader exhibition ecosystem—one that can create space for the many productions excluded from mainstream distribution chains.

I find it deeply inspiring that, in parts of Latin America, efforts to diversify cinema spaces are gaining traction. Initiatives such as Chile’s Red de Salas and Mexico’s Seminario Públicos y Audiencias del Futuro are leading examples of how cinema can reach a wider range of communities, challenging centralized models of access and recognition.

Just as we've seen major strides in democratizing film production over the last two decades, we must now apply the same thinking to other points in the chain—especially exhibition and the mechanisms that confer value. Too often, we're trying to apply a one-size-fits-all model to a complex, layered problem. Instead, we need to recognize and embrace the microverses—those local, specific, heterogeneous ecosystems where cinema can actually thrive.

There are countless well-equipped auditoriums and spaces across the country—from universities and educational institutions to professional association venues and community centers—that sit empty for most of the year. Instead of constantly strategizing about how to bring audiences to us, we need to flip the idea: we should be thinking about how to reach them in a more horizontal, community-based way—by going where the audiences already are.

Beyond focusing on the creation of new festivals—which are time- and resource-intensive and happen only a few days each year—we need to create more fluid experiences that offer audiences ongoing, meaningful opportunities to engage with cinema in person throughout the year.

Cinema—along with a handful of other art forms—remains one of the few places where we can bring together diverse and divergent communities. In a time when global powers have weaponized polarization as a tool of control, the act of gathering people around a shared screen to experience and discuss a film becomes more political than ever.

At the same time, in an era where we’re constantly bombarded by headlines and expected to react instantly—whether through traditional or social media—cinema offers something increasingly rare: time. The running time of a film becomes a protected space, allowing us to slow down, reflect, and sit with life’s ambiguities. It offers refuge from the performative immediacy of the everyday media vortex—and creates room, however briefly, for genuine contemplation and reflection.

We Need to Take the Movies Out of the Film World

If the artform is flourishing but the infrastructure is failing, then the challenge before us isn’t to save cinema—it’s to reimagine its ecosystems. This crisis has been decades in the making—but it brings with it an opportunity: to build new, more accurate models of commercialization and circulation that truly center the interests of filmmakers and audiences. We need to put those two stakeholders at the center of the equation and generate economies around that interaction. To create more real spaces for films to connect with the people they were made for.

We need to take back the public space of cinema—as a site of resistance, of dialogue, of collective imagination. We must reclaim the creation of a public sphere through film—especially as all cultural life is increasingly privatized, corporatized, and platformed.

Before the pandemic, the industry remained stubbornly convinced that its model still worked. But platforms and speculative capital shattered that fragile equilibrium and exposed how deeply broken it was. We have great film production. We have enthusiastic audiences. But the film industry, as it stands, is blocking that natural, organic connection—substituting its own self-interest in place of the public good.

In many cases, we in the film world are the first to alienate audiences—with our convoluted jargon, our obsession with festival laurels, and our fascination with pull quotes. The need to find better, more meaningful ways to engage audiences has long been a pressing issue.

When Monika Wagenberg and I launched Cinema Tropical almost 25 years ago, we did so because we saw that the film industry—even then, already outdated—wasn’t providing enough opportunities for Latin American cinemas. There was a clear need to create more spaces for validation and circulation of these works. In other words, the issues being discussed today are neither new nor recent. But the fact that the film world has finally come to terms with the reality that the system isn’t working opens up finally the possibility for broader, more meaningful change.

And we do have many allies beyond the film world. Just as many artists and professionals have embraced film as a tool of expression, they’re also eager to engage with cinema culture more fully. But we need to take the time to build those direct connections and imagine new forms of collaboration. It’s time we act generously—and bring the movies out of our self-centered film world.

*A version of this text was presented at the second retreat of Distribution Advocates on Saturday, June 14 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.