Cinematography

 About the history of Panamanian cinema

Although it has been in recent years that the Panamanian film industry has begun to take hold, attempts to make national cinema have been multiple and varied.

October 2014 will go down in history as the time when Panamanian feature films I nvasión, Historias del Canal, and Rompiendo la Ola shared the billboard to compete for a segment of the box office against the Hollywood film industry. This unprecedented fact in Panama becomes more relevant when considering that some of these films were kept in theaters for more than ten weeks, indicating the preference of the public and the economic viability of Panamanian cinema. And it becomes even more relevant because, before that date, only five Panamanian films had been released in theaters.

Until that moment, Panama was one of the countries with the lowest levels of film production in the world, specifically of films that usually tell fictional stories or documentaries in 90 to 110 minutes and that the public must pay at the box office to see. Of these, only five in almost 120 years of world cinema history: Reinas (2014), Chance (2010), La Noche (2002), Ileana, la Mujer (1966), and When illusion dies (1949).

 The history of Panamanian cinema proper begins in the 1920s. One of the pioneers, John de Pool, arrived from Curaçao hired by La Estrella de Panamá to work as a photogravure technician; then he produced the first film newscasts to be screened in the cinema and made documentaries such as La balsería, about the ancient indigenous rite. Between 1926 and 1936, the Mexican Manuel Ricardo Sánchez Durán started a film newscast for the Mexican production company Pelimex. Sánchez Durán filmed the events in Panama, sent the film with a script to Mexico, and the tape developed and edited was returned to him for projection in the cinema. This film archive was destroyed in a fire in which the campaigns of former President Arnulfo Arias and other valuable images of national history were lost.