This project will analyze how film festival, state aid, and private funding contribute to the aesthetics of films and web series produced in Costa Rica between 2010–2020. Within the balkanized region of Central America, local audiovisual production efforts have had several false starts in the 20th and beginning of the 21st Century. Through its position of relative political, social and economic stability, it is possible to observe diverse funding dynamics in the surge of audiovisual production in Costa Rica. More than attempting to trace a “national cinema”, this project posits that Costa Rica serves as the setting for a diverse group of development and production initiatives that interact with each other. By analyzing the subject matters, and audiovisual languages displayed, this project aims to elucidate the correlations between these different film aesthetics and these funding configurations.

Situated within the media production studies, this project will map out the funding mechanisms used to achieve the production of the audiovisual projects, analyzing the characteristics of the different funding mechanisms and drawing out the relationships between each other and as configurated in different audiovisual projects. The analysis of the audiovisual texts will be situated within the funding structures that made their creation possible, establishing relations between the funding and the style and narrative choices made for the films and web series. This project will benefit from direct access to funding documentation from the different projects, as well as interviews with executors and administrators from media production funds, and producers and directors.

Camilo Porras Sandoval is a staff member, instructor as well as PhD candidate at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. His dissertation focuses on media funding in Costa Rica. His research interests also include media production studies, gender and queer studies, dramaturgy and narratology. He studied communication studies and audiovisual production at the Universidad de Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica and the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Erlangen, Germany. He completed his M.A. in Media Dramaturgy at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany. For his master’s graduation project, he developed the transmedia series Sebastian ama el drama/Sebastian liebt das Drama and wrote on gay masculinities in Latin-American web series.