The nine essays in this collection, researched and written between 2008 and 2011, provide a ‘snapshot’ of transnational filmmaking practices in the imagined community of nations that we define as the Hispanic world roughly between the years 2005 and 2010. With its emphasis on film festivals, international funding agencies, and co-productions, we have concentrated on films that circulate ‘abroad’, but it is perhaps worth underscoring once more the fact that many films are both financed and circulate within Latin America without any recourse to ‘foreign assistance’. These range from the Globofilmes-produced (or marketed) popular comedies and TV spin-offs in Brazil, to genre films in Venezuela, to the kind of recent exploitation films discussed in a number of chapters in Tierney and Ruétalo's ground-breaking Latsploitation collection.

In the year we go to press (2012), ‘Hispanic’ films continue to attract international attention and praise: for example, the current severe funding crisis in Portuguese cinema has been overshadowed in the press by the critical success of feature-length and short films, while the Hollywood Reporter declared this year, as a result of box-office and production increases and the notable presence of Latin American films at Cannes 2012, ‘It's a good time to be part of the Latin American film industry’.