Celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2014, the annual ¡Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival has been a long-standing feature of Manchester’s cultural scene. Inaugurated in 1995, ¡Viva! – initially a Spanish film festival – was held every March at Cornerhouse cinema and centre for contemporary visual arts on Oxford Road until 2015, after which it moved to HOME, Manchester’s new international centre for contemporary visual art, film and theatre. As Latin American film was incorporated into the festival in 2004, the festival allows for a focused and in-depth examination of the contemporary production and consumption of Latin American culture in Manchester. In chapter 2, I analysed the development of Latin American magical realism in the British press (1940–2015) and demonstrated how magical realism became, and is still used as, a primary prism through which Latin America is interpreted in the UK. In order to assess the extent to which such an interpretation exists within the contemporary cultural production of Latin America in the UK beyond the press, in this chapter I examine the encoding of Latin America through ¡Viva!. The chapter analyses festival brochures, podcasts, programming, imagery, advertising, film reviews and press articles, as well as Q&A sessions with film directors and personal interviews conducted with festival organisers.

I begin with a history and overview of ¡Viva! and note how, as for many film festivals worldwide, it has become increasingly difficult for ¡Viva!’s organisers to secure regular funding and sponsorship. In an effort to appeal to and attract larger paying audiences, lead festival images have repeatedly foregrounded aspects of Latin American geography, ethnicity, culture and society that the White middle-class majority of the ¡Viva! audience, living in the UK, would find markedly different to their own, even though this has, in fact, been largely unrepresentative of the films in the festival programme. As part of the general discourse of difference encoded into the festival (which complies with the ethos of Cornerhouse, and now HOME, as a space of ‘alternative’ cinema and art), films, as well as festival brochures and film reviewers, have encoded Latin America with the notion of ‘quirky’ and ‘offbeat’ characters and situations.